


... if he wriggles, let him go.

by apiphile



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Blood, Disability, F/M, Gaslighting, Gen, Hallucinogens, Homophobia, Kink, LSD, M/M, Misogyny, Murder, Racism, Torture, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Transphobia, Villain Protagonist, Violence against women, a dubious approach to consent, a slightly wibbly approach to canon, ableism why not, amputee character, at least i looked up the guns?, did i mention the wound-fucking, druggie doctors, fifty shades of morally grey, he only looks like less of a shit because jim is even more of one, head injuries as flirting, horrible people in horrible love, i mean it's not really kink it's sort of beyond that, protagonist is a total shit, restaurants i want to visit, snobbery, some fudging of distances and times, some inaccurate medical stuff, spitting as flirting, technically abuse?, transgender protagonist, unresearched military jargon, violence against men, what is in effect grooming, wound-fucking, woundfucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 05:25:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3345212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A relationship between two very unpleasant people, from beginning to end. I realise that my guerilla approach to tagging makes people disinclined to read them but if you'd like to avoid unpleasant shocks PLEASE READ THE TAGS. </p><p>Written almost entirely to amuse Francis, beta'd at the speed of lightning by Cribbins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	... if he wriggles, let him go.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fluorineandsilver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorineandsilver/gifts), [jar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jar/gifts).



"When an irritant gets into an oyster, in time the oyster secretes enough protective mucus that it produces a pearl," said Isobel Blakeney to the Colonel, as he sat opposite her in Le Gavroche, determinedly waiting for lunch to arrive. "One's never quite sure how it will turn out, with people."

The Colonel regarded Isobel with half-closed eyes and tried to maintain a neutral expression. 

She said, "I mean, one knows _now_ that all your … awfulness at school was because of … this—"

The Colonel felt in his cheek with his tongue. "I just wasn't very academic, Izzy."

"You headbutted matron," Isobel snorted to herself. "Really, one ought to have guessed."

"Guessed what?" the Colonel asked, annoyed by her clumsy coyness.

"That you were… not like the rest of us."

"No one _else_ ran off to shoot Pakis for ten years, you mean?" he asked, deliberately misinterpreting her as punishment for her tiptoeing. Over Isobel's shoulder, red-cheeked diners came in from the chilly winds outside and tried to look casual about how impressed they were.

" _Caro_ – I mean, Sebastian, _really_ ," Isobel exclaimed. "You can't call them that!"

"You're right," the Colonel agreed, unabashed. "I also shot Afghanis, Syrians, Libyans…" he added under his breath, "… one or two Americans, couple of Brits, a Canadian…"

Isobel looked queasy. "You know I don't mean that."

The Colonel stared through her with the same approximation of well-bred bovinity which had seen him clear up at baccarat last month. "Beg pardon," he said, "must have misinterpreted those hints you're leaving around the place."

"You're not… sensitive about it, are you?" Isobel asked, suddenly hesitant, and also strongly implying that sensitivity was an unexpected failing in him. "Oh dear, I do hope I'm not being offensive."

The Colonel, who was about as sensitive as an industrial diamond, sneered.

"The leg?" he asked. "Not at all. I'll take it off and show you if you like."

" _No_ , thank you," said Isobel, with a shudder.

"The hand?"

" _No_ , Ca—Sebastian, not the hand."

"Then I'm at a loss," said he, leaning over his cutlery to sneer at her more closely. "And I'd advise you to be, too."

Isobel sniffed and turned her attention to the tablecloth. "You always were the most dreadful bully, Moran."

The first course arrived, and saved him from having to pretend to care about her wounded feelings, or to imply that he had any of his own.

The Colonel busied himself with the boudin noir, a far higher quality dish than he'd been accustomed to of late, dining on an army pension with the domestic skills of a stuffed duck. Isobel made troubled faces at her consommé and began working her way up to something: the Colonel wished dearly that it was still acceptable to kick her silent, as it had been at school.

Instead, he made a mental tick next to her name, on the list of 'people who still speak to me and can afford to buy me a decent lunch', and a note not to hit her up for another six months at minimum.

He had cleared his plate in silence before he recalled that it had been Isobel who had contacted _him_.

"Out with it," he suggested, sitting back as his glass was refilled. He made a point of resting the remains of his left hand on his thigh, and letting his best trousers ride up just enough to show about an inch or so of titanium prosthetic below the cuff. The waiter eyeballed both, and scurried away.

Isobel abandoned her consommé with relief. "You see, the thing is…" she gave the Colonel a wary look and plunged on. "I'd like to invite you to a little… thing." She bit her lip. Isobel had worn an expensive lipstick designed to make it look as if she hadn't worn one at all, but no amount of greasepaint could distract from how much she looked like a horse. "Did you _have_ to order veal head?"

"What 'thing'?" The Colonel asked, as the plate was spirited away. Isobel had never really mastered the art of precise communication. "I happen to like it."

Isobel said, "I would just have sent an invite on Facebook, but…"

The Colonel stared at her with mounting impatience. He didn't have a bloody Facebook account, a bloody Twitter, a bloody anything. The content of his life was not for sharing, and now that there was no privileged information to be squandered on the internet, he didn't much feel like reversing his position on the worthlessness of social media. He drummed the tip of his left index finger and the first knuckle stump of the left middle finger on the table, waiting, and was a little amused by the way she watched the play of broken-off hand-bones beneath his skin with mesmerised horror.

"I just wanted to be sure," Isobel said at last, "that you'd come, that you wouldn't think it was pity or—"

He hadn't, until now.

"What 'thing', Izzy?" the Colonel repeated, shifting his titanium leg back under the table so as not to find himself with a hubristic lap full of soup. 

"Michael is having a sort of … well, it's networking, really. Arms people. Security."

The Colonel sat up in spite of himself. "Alright, when?"

"Next month," Isobel said, offering a weak, hopeful smile. "It's at the Landmark – I say – you're not put out, then?"

"I could do with a job," the Colonel muttered, which Isobel took as thanks. The veal arrived, and he fell to it with gusto. Private sector sounded fucking pathetic from where he stood, but he had a very specific set of skills which didn't see much use in civilian life, and they paid well – especially if one had, as he did, a marked lack of scruples.

The Colonel chewed thoughtfully. He just needed to make them overlook the fact that he was a transgender _cripple_ , and there was a chance of making some real money. Time to brush off the old connections, and try to remember a little about diplomacy.

* * *

The grand ballroom at the Landmark Hotel, despite its name, boasted no dance floor. It was carpeted from end to end in the upper tier of ugly corporate carpeting, and for this occasion, a mingling of men and women who made their money in conflict; some desperately unendearing tables and chairs in the same vein had been produced at the edges of the room.

The Colonel had abandoned his stick for the night. Private sector types, he was sure, were even more like sharks than the officer's mess. Sensing blood in the water – some sign of weakness – they would tear him apart, and he'd leave with no contract. He'd worn the lifelike leg. He couldn't bring himself, however, to cover up his hand.

"Hi hi," said a cheerful, Home Counties voice beside him, as he stared at the assembled dealers, prosecco in hand. Not even real champagne. "I spy a military man!" the voice added, with barely-contained excitement. A friendly punch struck the Colonel on the arm. He turned slowly to glare at the culprit, but found himself cut off by a pair of idiots in flash suits who didn't seem to have noticed him at all.

The Colonel readjusted his temper, and his bearing, and pretended to sip the crap in his glass.

He was beginning to grow extremely bored when a pale man with an ugly nose who seemed to be greeting everyone in turn made his way to the Colonel. "Hello, I'm Roos," the man said, shaking the Colonel's hand. "Who do you represent?"

"Myself," said the Colonel, bluntly extracting his hand.

"Cool, cool," said Roos, disappointed and nodding spasmodically. "And who is yourself?"

"Colonel Sebastian Moran," said the Colonel, baring his teeth in what he hoped was a smile.

"Oh," said Roos, losing all trace of friendliness. "Job-hunter."

He left without another word. The Colonel tried some more of the prosecco: it was still middle class and too sweet. He tried to ignore Roos's tone – the way he said 'job-hunter’ like 'dog shit' – but couldn't stop himself trying to calculate how many other ex-Army personnel were in the room, by bearing and stare.

He examined a few at the far end of the room who'd clearly held rifles a lot, and had just turned his attention to some braying navy suits in the middle who clearly had _not_ , when he became aware that he was being watched.

A short man with a large forehead and the most intensely focussed eyes the Colonel had ever seen stood on the far side of the room, chewing gum, with his hands in the pockets of a well-tailored, expensive, utterly vulgar suit. The Colonel blinked. The ferocity of the man's stare, combined with his continual mastication, made him seem as if he planned on some profane act of cannibalism.

"Hi," said a woman with blonde highlights, stepping into some very charged space in front of the Colonel. She extended her hand. "Rebecca Crew. Hi."

"And who are you with?" the Colonel asked, shaking her hand with firm disinterest.

"I just left Blackwood," said she, already peering over his shoulder – with heels on she was too tall for him to return the compliment – in the hunt for more important conversational partners. "So I'm a free agent."

"An agent of what?" he asked, wearing a smile reserved for ticket inspectors, traffic wardens, Army boards, and other people he couldn't get away with punching.

"I'm a broker," said Crew, with no further elaboration, leaning away from him. "Who are you with?"

"I _was_ with Her Majesty's Armed Forces," said the Colonel, holding his grimace. " _Now_ I'm looking for someone who'll pay me to shoot foreigners. Preferably children."

It did not have the desired and usual effect of making her fuck off and stop wasting his time. Instead, Crew gave him a laugh and a wink that said she'd already stopped listening, and said, "Aren't we all?"

"Fuck's sake," muttered the Colonel, forcing supermarket wine into his mouth as the Crew women patted him on the shoulder and moved on.

In the lull that followed, he heard a man with a voice like a donkey explaining that Lee Enfield were sunk, old news, shitty rifles. Rifles, in Donkey's opinion, were practically bows and arrows. The Colonel listened in spite of himself to a masturbatory list of unnecessary toggles and tassles on whatever sub-Khyber rubbish the sales wonk was trying to push. It sounded like high-end temperamental crap with no practical field use and an inflated bill attached. Exactly the kind of thing the Americans liked to spray all over their troops, which usually ended up firmly in the paws of whomever they were subduing.

He sucked his teeth reflexively, and glanced across the room. The intense little man with eyes like black holes was still looking at him, but now – the Colonel recoiled a little – he was smiling as if he'd spotted a blue diamond the size of a golf ball.

" _You_ ," said a sales wonk, patting the Colonel abruptly on the bicep, "look like a man with _real world_ experience, am I right?"

"Not sure I'd call a bunch of disintegrating desert shitholes 'real world', but alright," the Colonel said, staring at the wonk's hand.

"Ha ha," agreed the sales wonk. "Oh yeah. No, you can't civilise a place by dropping cluster munitions on it but _man_ can you shut up the opposition good and fast with the right gear, am I right?"

"No," said the Colonel. "They get resentful and they breed like fucking rabbits. You have to break their bloody spirits or the next generation is just as bad." He gave the man a cheerless, vindictive grin. "Hearts and Minds."

The wonk agreed eagerly, and launched into a spiel about some kind of air support the Colonel didn't especially care for, until he looked across the room and found the black-eyed weirdo in the well-cut suit had gone.

He began to feel uncomfortable. He felt there was an unseen wasp in the room, and it bothered him.

The Colonel pushed past the sales wonk and abandoned the supermarket filth wine to the nearest table. He made a point of walking evenly, briskly, his head up, not favouring his leg, and as a consequence was tired by his own pain by the time he reached the lavatories.

Roos was at the urinals. The Colonel ignored him, and he ignored the Colonel, who opened a stall door and slipped inside. He adjusted the silicon cup, pissed resentfully. _Civilians._

There was a choked-off cry outside.

The Colonel paused mid-piss. He did not call out to see who was out there. Interference in matters in bathrooms could, he was only too aware, be fatal. Instead, he froze and strained his ears. There were no footsteps, but he heard the brief rustle of clothes – then, a series of muffled thumps.

Now steps. The sound of cloth dragged over floor tiles. Quiet bang of bathroom door.

The Colonel listened, head on one side, until he was sure the show was over. When no further sound came, he resumed pissing, shoulders held loose and ready to fight.

There was no sign of Roos when he came out, and only a pinkish tint in the water draining out of the urinal suggested what might have become of him.

The Colonel stepped out the bathroom door and straight in front of the short man with the intense eyes.

They regarded each other for a moment. The man chewed once, violently, on gum. Then he broke into an entirely sunny smile not matched by the bleak black depths of his eyes, and said, "Time for a job interview, Colonel Moran."

The Colonel didn't bother to ask how his name had come to be in this man's mouth. If someone wanted to find it, it wouldn't be hard. Nor did he trouble himself to move out of the bathroom doorway. He only inclined his head a little and let the door close against his arse. There was something familiar about the man's voice, something which sat wrong against the deep, rich Irish accent and suggested he'd heard it before recently, but used without its natural vowels.

"How do you feel," the perplexingly familiar voice asked, as its owner transformed himself into a fascinated schoolboy with the application of his hands to his pockets and a couple of swings of his knees, "about shooting people?"

The Colonel considered this, and shrugged.

The smile faded a little, and the black eyes grew a little blacker somehow. "You misunderstand me," said his interviewer, in a flat, dead voice. "I can get hundreds of pathetic ex-Amy wreckages, just as good marksmen as you—" clearly, thought the Colonel, he'd done a little homework, "—to put aside their morals for the right amount of _cash_. And all of them still have their limbs attached." He gave an unpleasant, throaty chuckle. "What I'm looking for is someone who enjoys his work."

The Colonel said, "The satisfaction of a job well done?"

His interviewer gave him a contemptuous look. "A man who is both a professional and someone who gets a quickening in his pulse when he zips an armour-plated rounded through the orbit of a pensioner."

"Excuse me," said the sales wonk the Colonel had been talking to – or trying to avoid talking to – before he went to piss, "you're in the way?"

The Colonel's interviewer turned his head to the sales wonk in the most bovine manner possible and said, very slowly, "He's. Busy."

"Just –" began the sales wonk. He stopped, looked beyond the conversation to a group of people standing further away – one of them had just gestured – and backed away hurriedly. His expression changed to one of almost comical horror. "Sorry," he said, and bolted into the ladies' bathrooms instead.

The Colonel half-closed his eyes and sized up his interviewer. There was something uncanny – unheimlich, but also known – about him. His eyes put the Colonel strongly in mind of the caves in which he'd sold – he blinked.

"What sort of money?" he asked, staring past the short man to the darkened windows at the end of the corridor. The wonk had vanished: he wondered who had taken Roos and where they'd stashed him. It was unsettling – nothing a stiff drink couldn't handle, of course – that these things happened and went unnoticed.

"The satisfaction," drawled his interviewer, with a horrible smile, "of a job well done."

"That's all very well," said the Colonel, gruffly, "but a man has to live while he's doing target practice on grannies. Contentment doesn't pay off the mortgage."

The short man with the black, bottomless eyes, like the hole where the Colonel's guilt had fucked off and died years ago, broke into a sharp smirk. "You can have as much as you want."

"Really," said the Colonel flatly. He watched three reps walk part of the way down the corridor, clock who he was talking to, and turn back in haste. He wondered who he _was_ talking to. "What if I require a _lot_ of money?"

"I've got a lot of money," said his interviewer, waving one hand in careless irritation. "It bores me. Have what you like. What would you do if I asked you take out someone right here?"

"Point out that I don't have anything to do it with," said the Colonel. He thought a little longer. "I lack experience in garrotting but that's always worth a go, I s'pose," he added, meditating on it further. "I could find a way to hang 'em."

"Practical," agreed his interviewer. "Well, Colonel Moran, you've almost got the job." He extended his hand – his _left_ hand – for the Colonel to shake.

The Colonel grudgingly put his half-a-hand into his interviewer's grip.

"Name's Jim," he said. "Jim Moriarty."

The Colonel felt his fingers, soft as a child's, suddenly stroke the scar tissue where he'd once had a pinky and a ring finger and part of a palm. He forced himself not to tense up, and met Jim's unnerving eye. "Almost?"

"I just need to know a couple of _tiny_ things," said Jim, still holding his hand. He glanced at the hand. "Nice."

The Colonel nodded, dry-mouthed.

"Did you have a nickname, at school?" Jim asked, as if this were a normal interview question and gently stroking a potential employee's wound were a perfectly normal part of the process.

"Basher," said the Colonel. "And you?"

Jim smiled a slow and dirty smile. "Oh I was known as Psycho Jim, for reasons I don't think you need to know yet. Why 'Basher'? The public school lack of imagination striking?"

The Colonel said, "I had a very direct way of dealing with squits who annoyed me."

Jim finally withdrew his hand. "It's lacking in finesse but it works," he said, his head on one side. "Now, about the other thing. Well, two other things."

The Colonel waited. 

"There's an L1181 awc in the third cubicle of that bathroom," said Jim, without inflection or expression, "and it is, naturally, fully loaded. There are fourteen reps from OMI here, and all of them are fair game, but I don't want to see more than two down overall."

The Colonel gave this consideration. With no idea of how to locate himself safely, he only nodded. 

"Also," said Jim, looking up at the Colonel with the kind of expression he'd only ever seen on General Arbuthnot before he’d been General anything, and which he'd have given a lot not to be seeing now. "When they cut your tits off, did it scar much?"

The Colonel breathed out slowly through his nose. That information wasn't well-hidden either. Homework was homework. But he could feel the colour in his face rise all the same, and gritted his teeth. He said, in tones that would have given a charging bull pause, "Only a little."

"Show me," said Jim, idly.

The Colonel knew in that second that hesitation would lead somewhere dangerous. In a flash of intuition – the kind to which he was not at all prone – he knew who had seen Roos done away with, and that if that unlucky man's carcass were ever found it would be for a specific and calculated purpose. He unbuttoned his shirt.

Without a moment's heed for the whispering cadre of reps at the other end of the corridor, the Colonel threw back the sides of his suit jacket and raised his shirt. His arms prevented him from seeing, but he was well-familiar with the way that inconsistent, thick, mousy-brown chest hair did not obscure the curve – like a smiling mouth – across his chest.

Jim jabbed him none-too-gently under the nipple – the nipple itself had never regained sensation but the surrounds were tender enough.

"Oh well," said Jim, withdrawing his hand. "We can fix that later." He turned on his heel. "Happy hunting."

"How _much_?" the Colonel asked, stubbornly rooted to the spot with his shirt open.

"Name your price," said Jim, his back to the Colonel.

"Four hundred thousand," the Colonel blurted, pulling it out of the air. It would at least cover the mortgage, if it ever made it to him at all.

"Perfect," said Jim. "Not greedy, not cheap. Go get 'em," he added, leaning back to push open the bathroom door behind the Colonel, "tiger."

* * *

Colonel Sebastian Moran watched the news through a half-open bathroom door, and regretted bitterly that he had nothing to hand to counteract the more digestive side-effects of dihydrocodeine.

"Tonight's main story—"

"Bunch of socialists," muttered the Colonel, bending over his thighs to readjust the foot around his titantium prosthesis. Still, he'd left the remote in the living room, so the red-tinted BBC it would have to be, until his gut relented and let him shit.

"—rrorist group, the Holy Arm, have claimed responsibility," went on the newsreader, oblivious to the Colonel's dislike of her employers' bias. "The Landmark Hotel has pledged to investigate its security measures, after two people were shot dead at an industry conference last night. Terrorist group The Holy Army, linked to militant separatists within an Albanian-dominated area of Greece, have released a statement claiming responsibility for the deaths of two sales representatives from Greek defence manufacturer OMI."

The Colonel eyeballed the television for a moment, and contemplated the satisfaction of nailing two running targets amid the mob attempting to evacuate for a bomb alert.

He straightened up. The satisfaction wasn't going to cover his debts, and last time he'd checked an ATM his balance still had a minus in front of it. He wondered if cash was more likely, and when exactly to expect that to happen.

The TV moved on to regional news. A transport contractor had unexpectedly folded, resulting in a thousand redundancies. A teenager had been stabbed on a night bus in Lewisham and police wanted to talk to a university student who might have been there at the time. 

The Colonel braced himself against the bathroom sink and hauled himself to his feet; one flesh, one rubber. He walked naked into the living room and switched off the news.

"Nice," said Jim Mortiarty, from the kitchen doorway, "but I was watching that."

The Colonel said, "This had better be about my money," although he wasn't sure what he was planning on doing if it wasn't. He abandoned the string of other possible responses: _why and how are you here, get the fuck out, who are the Holy Army, why aren't the police looking for me, I don't care if you're bloody watching it, who were those people_. 

He only extended his right hand and said, "Pass the dressing gown."

Jim picked it up from the kitchen floor and gave him an unreadable look with sleepy eyes. Held the dressing gown in both hand and intoned, "Say please."

"Please," said the Colonel, annoyed at being patronised in his own home but not stupid enough to show it.

Jim flung the garment at his left hand; the Colonel caught it with his right.

"You need working on," Jim said, mildly. "I see you stitched up your front hole."

"Money," said the Colonel, pulling on the dressing gown. Jim made the deeply insulting idiom seem both harmless and like a violation that was more violent than sexual, despite its psychological aim.

"Oh, that." Jim nudged with his foot – clad in nasty, bright white trainers that looked just out of the box – a sports bag which looked old and heavy. "It's cash. Since you don't seem to have a proper laundry."

The Colonel sighed. "I don't typically need one." Not having previously been in the habit of taking sums of money that needed laundering before use: he'd sold a few things for cash – secrets, people, arms – but the thing with cash was that usually it went back out as fast as it came in. It didn't hang around long enough for him to need an excuse for its presence.

"Well you do now," said Jim, lacking the forceful dominance of the conference, but having lost none of his weirdness and menace. "I'll handle that."

The Colonel tied up his dressing gown. "Right."

Jim withdrew a phone from the back pocket of his jeans. The Colonel wasn't sure how it could have fitted, for although the phone was slim and sleek, the fit of the jeans was obnoxiously tight. 

He held out the phone to the Colonel.

The Colonel stared at it.

Jim wiggled the phone up and down. "You'll be needing this."

"I have a phone," said the Colonel, patiently.

"No, you _had_ a phone and it met with a tragic accident," said Jim, biting his lip in an uncomfortable parody of an innocent _mea culpa_. "Take it."

The Colonel accepted the phone, and did not ask what had happened to his previous one, which had been the sort which could limp on after taking a bullet through the casing. 

"Don't worry," Jim added, "I saved all your contacts."

 _I bet you did_ , the Colonel thought, unimpressed. He laid the phone on the back of his sofa and waited for Jim to make the next move, preferably in a direction away from him and out of his damn flat.

"Might have another job for you in a few days," Jim said, swinging on the doorhandle.

"Already," said the Colonel, careful not to appear at all surprised. He felt a little like the time he'd wandered off onto rough ground, half-drunk, and sobered up with vicious suddenness when it occurred to him that the click underfoot might have been the priming of a landmine. That time it had been a piece of discarded metal with no mine attached, but it had left him with a nagging awareness that the next thing he stood on could be a mine.

The irony of losing his leg to something completely unexplosive had not been lost on him.

"Oh yes," said Jim. "Working for me will get your _very_ consistent employment."

"You could just have asked for my number," the Colonel grumbled. He had no emotional attachment to his old phone – to most things – but he detested smartphones and what Jim had foisted on him from his arse pocket was smart enough to open its own tailoring business.

"Sebastian. I've already _got_ your number," said Jim, with an extravagant wink and a deeper voice than what the Colonel cautiously admitted may have counted as usual.

He waltzed out of the door without another word.

Thirty seconds later, as the Colonel stooped to inspect the bag and found it more full of Treasury notes than anything he'd previously touched in his life, the new phone began to play the theme to _The Day of the Jackal_. 

"Arsehole," said the Colonel, rising with difficulty. The phone displayed the name "the Prof", and he replied to it only with a cautious, "Yes?"

"Very good," said Jim's voice in a low purr. "Never identify yourself on the phone."

* * *

True to what the Colonel had already observed was his style, Jim picked the most bloody-minded and inconvenient moment to communicate his wishes regarding future engagements. The best window for this conversation, in Jim’s mind, appeared to be over the phone at 4am when the Colonel had taken multiple opiate-derived painkillers.

The Colonel did not agree with this assessment, but he listened as well as he could, until he registered that his new employer wanted to meet to discuss the assignment in an unmonitored environment, not give him the details at this precise moment.

Once the Colonel had ascertained this, he fell asleep mid-sentence.

He woke up groggy and foul-tempered, as was his wont, and, by dint of his meeting place appearing on the TV, actually remembered what he was supposed to be doing in time to get there.

St Paul’s Cathedral’s side chapel was, in the Colonel’s view, the distinct opposite of a private meeting place, but if Jim wanted to be a show-off then that was his concern. He sat in one of the chapel pews, bowed his head, and executed the time ahead of him by trying to rearrange in his mind a priority list for debt repayments, based on how fast various parties would break his remaining knee if he was any later.

He felt, rather than heard, a presence join him on the pew. He did not open his eyes.

“Our father,” intoned Jim’s distinctive voice, swaddled in a ludicrous American accent and a great deal of scathing irony, “who art in service, here be thy name: Isobel Blakeney.”

The Colonel kept his eyes closed and his hands praying.

“I don’t care how, or where,” murmured Jim, abandoning the pretence of prayer, “but I need it done by Friday.”

The Colonel nodded minutely. 

He waited twenty-five minutes, and left the chapel.

* * *

The Colonel considered, as he removed his Lee Enfield No. 5 from its spot in order to reach the L118A1 hidden at the back of the broom cupboard, that he ought to be more disturbed. He had little patience for sentiment, but the idea that Izzy Blakeney merited an expensive assassination was bizarre and sat uneasily in his mind.

She had the criminal connections of a flatfish. Michael might have spivved for the arms industry but he spivved for everyone: his job was putting people in a big room and getting them loudly drunk, regardless of whether their business was oil stocks or dropping mortars on hospitals. Izzy was pointless and she was also _discreet_ , which had kept him in her company when he was dishonourably discharged. She was hardly a candidate for a half-a-million murder.

He backed out of the cupboard, holding his old service rifle.

_Why her?_

There were, he reminded himself, defence connections in a manner of speaking. The conference was after all how he’d met Jim. Maybe she was meant to be some kind of warning to someone else. 

It occurred to him that he had no idea what business Jim ran. 

It occurred to him that it might be safest to keep it that way. 

He laid the L118A1 on the sofa and frowned at it. He had maintained the bitch at a standard suitable for immediate field use, but he was conscious that the same rifle in the hands of a lance corporal would merit a tirade from his or her sergeant and an order for immediate stripping and cleaning. Was that an acceptable weapon for ending a childhood friendship with?

The Colonel got to work.

Why Isobel, though?

He glanced at the new phone resting on the arm of the sofa. Stupid question. Correct one was clearly _how_. Was a rifle – his instinctive choice – truly practical? How traceable was this? Where did one get other weapons these days?

He looked at the phone again. A man who casually stashed SAS-issue rifles in hotel bathrooms no doubt had access to unlimited weaponry, if only asked.

The Colonel smacked the phone onto the floor with the back of his left hand. He could just as well stab her with a bloody pizza knife. Enough teenagers did it.

He stood up and looked down at his reassembled rifle. Could buy a sports job and lift some ammo from somewhere, because he really wasn’t going to do anything so unsporting as stab Isobel Blakeney. It wasn’t as if he had the right prosthetic or enough practice to be able to run away afterwards, for one thing.

The Colonel recalled that he’d once punched her in the neck for calling him a lazy cow. Youthful indiscretion. Unprofessional. Times had changed. She was technically his friend, even if his friendship had been characterised by sponging, belittling, and occasionally kicking. 

He hefted the rifle, and put it back in the cupboard. There were other guns. He’d get one of those. This one wasn’t for killing friends with.

* * *

On Wednesday before lunch, the Colonel played golf with, and was checked up by, Dr Carrington.

“Any pain?” Dr Carrington asked, as they wandered down into the bunker to begin Dr Carrington’s run of bad luck anew.

The Colonel shrugged evasively and advised a different club. Dr Carrington took his advice, and hefted it thoughtfully. “Now listen, Sebastian,” he said, firmly, as he took up position. “The stoicism is all very well – excellent masculine camouflage and all that nonsense – but it won’t do any good to lie to _me_ about it. You might need a different prosthesis. Pain means things.”

“You need a different club.”

“I need less masochistic patients,” said Carrington, tartly, as he selected another. “How’re you sleeping?”

“Narcoticly.”

“Well, that’s not a great sign,” Carrington muttered with a frown, lining up his shot as best he could in the silvery sand.

“I could just be addicted.”

”Do you know, most people don’t prefer that explanation to persistent physical pain,” said Carrington, failing to clear the top of the bunker. “Bugger. What’s _causing_ the pain?”

The Colonel snorted. “I didn’t say there was any.”

“Yes,” said Carrington, a little testily, as he lined up his shot again, “but you’re not an addict.” He chipped the ball and sent it maybe six inches. “Well, not a _drug_ addict.”

* * *

On Wednesday evening, the Colonel relented and sent a text to Jim’s number. He sat down at the bottom of the statue of Christian Charity in Piccadilly, mislabelled Eros on the exits of the tube, and composed:

> Need tools for job

Laboriously, while parts of his body throbbed.

Silly little girls with fancy athletic curved prosthetics could prance around on stage and do fucking ballet, and he couldn’t even walk from Marylebone to Piccadilly any more, the Colonel thought sulkily. There had to be a solution that would allow him his old thuggish grace back, and fewer moments of inconvenient nausea from bastard bloody fucking painkillers.

He contemplated finding a physiotherapist, as he’d been repeatedly instructed to, and snorted.

Two hours later, his phone vibrated.

> You don’t contact me. I contact you.

Said an entirely new number.

The Colonel, slumming in a Caffe Nero with the precise opposite of enjoyment and a coffee that would have made a connoisseur vomit, replied:

> OK but still need tools.

The coffee was like licking the bottom of a shoe. The customers were little better than animals. The Colonel put his foot up on the table and, when a barista hurtled over to reprimand him, rolled up his trouser leg to show the titanium pole as if he was flashing his ankles at a punter.

She backed away, apologising. A vague, grim humour in that. Sudden politeness but no end of staring from the other patrons.

> Man who can’t take care of himself is no use to me.

The Colonel was intrigued to discover that even the bald little text message on the ugly and ostentatious screen, without inflection, still gave the impression that Jim was angry. He could hear a snarl in the glowing letters.

He shifted his buttocks on the cheap sofa.

> No good to you in prison either. L118A1 can be traced, No. 5 is inaccurate, others are decommissioned.

He raised his eyebrows at a teenage girl who was openly staring at his left hand, and considered lowering his index finger as well.

> Who said anything about prison? Stop making excuses.

_Fine_ , thought the Colonel, standing up fast enough that the rush of blood almost knocked him down again, and groping for his stick. He’d never wanted to go out in a blaze of glory against the police, but now it seemed inevitable. A small part of him gleefully insisted that it was better than rotting away in his flat on a piddling pension.

The phone buzzed again as he left, but he strode on as best he could, without checking it.

When he finally got home the Colonel recalled he didn’t have any food in, and reached for the phone to order whatever vile bin scrapings the local place had left at this time of night.

> Trust me.

“How fucking crazy do you think I _am_?” the Colonel snorted aloud to the empty flat, and he ordered a Chinese.

* * *

On Thursday morning he climbed onto the roof of the Wallace Collection. 

The Colonel had almost forgotten, living hand-to-mouth with beastly, self-inflicted debts for so many years, how swiftly cold hard cash shifted moral dilemmas and smoothed the passage through the world. The security guard hadn't asked why he wanted to go up here. Had raised no objection. Had sworn himself a purchasable amnesiac with regard to the Colonel's face. Had helped him with his bag and promised to turn away the curious.

Social and moral lubricant. But the Colonel had his suspicions.

He lined up his sights. Checked the wind. Eyeballed the distance, and checked it against one of the laser sights he'd always decried as amateur laziness. The measure on the grey screen agreed with his estimation.

He settled down gingerly on the roof to wait for Isobel's regular gossip excursion to the restaurant below. She would walk, not living far enough away to justify taking a taxi, and being possessed, of late, with an ill-suited health-and-virtue streak.

A pigeon landed and strutted about with self-importance in front of him. The Colonel regarded it with a bland, grey eye. He supposed he should stop mentally tagging Jim as short. They were more or less exactly the same height when the man stood up straight, which he did, it seemed, somewhat less than the Colonel.

He had the good fortune to attain a height not tall enough to have been especially remarkable when people still mistook him for a woman, and not short enough that, when the testosterone began to make itself known, he was conspicuously short as a man. As a consequence the Colonel had failed to develop much of a complex over his height and was as accustomed to boorishly hurling his weight around as he had always been, minus the obvious impediment of his leg, and his reluctance to bother with physio.

Lying back on the museum roof, the Colonel was aware that his employer might be less blasé about this hallmark of masculinity. 

The pigeon took off, leaving him with one less moving object to distract his eyes with. It was important to be decisive, that was all, he thought. As with any other shot – when pulling a trigger one should know when it was to be pulled. Have confidence in your judgment –

> Trust me

"He's a fucking weirdo," said the Colonel, under his breath.

In the square below, an army of twats in hats, all matching day-glo orange, bombarded the front of the building. 

"Get out of the way," the Colonel muttered, along with some assumptions about the nationality of the inconvenient tourists that were coincidentally correct but highly uncomplimentary, and marked by their unsuitability for use in polite conversation.

The sea of holidaymakers passed, and the Colonel massaged his thigh sheepishly with the finger-and-a-half of his left hand. It had grown unnecessarily tense.

He had almost passed into that thoughtless, near-meditative state that attends the lone sniper (and is one reason why they are meant to work in pairs), when the Colonel recognised Isobel's awkward, clop-shoed gait across the square.

Positioned her, allowing for her motion toward him. Sank into calm, steady breaths – seven in, eleven out – until his heart slowed and his eyes focussed. Caressed the trigger.

"Sentiment," the Colonel whispered, and shot her in the head.

She fell.

He packed up briskly, shook himself out of stasis, and passed the guard at the door without acknowledging him. Banged down the stairwell as heavily as he could on his leg. Watched Isobel crumple like an unwanted letter in his mind's eye.

Down went the Colonel, with his conspicuous bag. He stepped out of a kitchen door, found the taxi rank, went to the only Club that had been prepared to overlook his tragic birth defect.

Sitting in a leather armchair older than the regiment he'd served with, the Colonel permitted himself a quick shiver as he refocused his gaze from the middle distances, and tried to snap out of it.

* * *

"Wonderful," said Jim, plopping down beside him in Temple Gardens, like a stone dropped from the sky. "Spot on. Here's your key—"

The Colonel accepted it without looking. It was a bright day, bitterly cold, naked trees piercing the blue above. 

"Thistle, Lancaster Gate," said Jim, gazing out over the lawns with a kind of tranquillity and a croissant on his lap. "It’s under the bed."

The Colonel inclined his head a little. "Any reason for this one?"

Jim smiled serenely at the almost lurid green lawns before them, and put his hands behind his head. "Are you questioning my judgment, Colonel?"

The Colonel sat ramrod straight, but couldn't keep a little sarcasm out of his voice. It was one of the reasons he'd been better at giving orders than taking them. "No, _boss_. Expressing curiosity."

"It doesn't suit you," said Jim, idly tossing croissant crumbs at some uncharacteristically nervous pigeons. He paused, and added, "I don't _normally_ come and hand over money myself."

"I see," said the Colonel.

"Fuck off do you," Jim said mildly. "I wanted to see if you'd do it."

The Colonel nodded a few times. "That was the only reason," he said, because it wasn't as if he needed to ask.

"You passed," said Jim, putting croissant into his mouth the way teenagers in adverts ostentatiously folded in gum, the way no normal person ever ate. "You're in the process of passing."

The Colonel grunted. If there was one thing he had habitually taken for granted, it was that if there was some kind of passing to be done, he would manage it sooner or later. It had held good for exams, for military ranks, for gender. It had never occurred to him that this might be arrogance.

"Oh come _on_ ," Jim said, elbowing him in the side too hard. "She looked like a _horse_. You can't care."

The Colonel admitted that Isobel was a little equine to look at before her grievous facial wound.

"I didn't need there to be anyone who remembered that you specifically were at the Landmark," Jim added, soberly.

"Is that the reason?"

"No, said Jim with a sly smile. "I wanted to know if I was right about how far you'd go. I don't like this—" he waved a hand vaguely in front of the Colonel, "conscience. It's small and unsightly. Get rid of it."

The Colonel gave him a sloppy, sardonic salute, and went back to staring at the gardens. They sat in mutual silence as a lawyer strolled past with a phone in one hand and a pink vacuum cup in the other, barracking some unfortunate in furious Italian.

"What do you require?" the Colonel said at last, taking refuge from maddening vagueness in the kind of stiff formality that had saved him from expulsion and serious military discipline more than once.

"Put your life in my hands," Jim suggested.

This was too much for the Colonel to take. He snorted expansively and said without lifesaving tact or delicacy, "You're fucking mental."

"Yes," agreed Jim. "And you want to die. Stick with me and it'll be a fun and interesting death. I promise you that."

The Colonel did not dispute this assessment of his motives. He turned back to the path and said, "I meant, what is the next _job_."

Jim laughed at him for an uncomfortably long time. "I need you to come to a Russian mafia nightclub with me as my muscle."

The Colonel stared at him for a long minute. He didn't bother to indicate his fractional hand, his incomplete collection of limbs, the fact that he was a mere five feet eight inches tall and had been subject to a lot of muscle waste that hadn't yet been reversed. It was all perfectly obvious. "Is this a joke?"

"I don't joke."

"In what way am I likely to be mistaken for your _muscle_?"

"They'll think it funny and perverse," said Jim with a wolfish, dangerous smile. "It will ingratiate me. And, like everyone else, they'll _underestimate_ me."

The Colonel nodded. "And if there is actual trouble?"

"Oh," said Jim, lobbing the remains of his pastry at a crow with force, "always take a fat friend when you go bear-hunting."

"I see, " said the Colonel, who'd used a similar line himself several times, including at least one time when he'd got someone killed as a result of this 'just outrun the slowest' policy. "That doesn't sound like my kind of job."

He looked down at a sharp, sudden pricking sensation in his abdomen. He looked back up from the knife, into Jim's black, beautiful, doe-like eyes – currently bottomless with some ancient, unnameable horror that lurked in trenches and the dark of caves, that waited at the edges of consciousness, that smelled like gangrene and cordite and blind, primal terror.

"It's not up for discussion," Jim hissed, sudden and violent as a striking snake. The Colonel felt the skin of his belly break gently under the delicate pressure, and blood begin to soak into his shirt. 

"This is fun," the Colonel intoned, solemnly, as dry as the Afghan winds. The blood that wasn't seeping into expensive and now-ruined cotton had departed south to trouble him in inappropriate places.

"Good," said Jim, smiling. "Now. You will show up at around one, looking presentable." He poked the Colonel tenderly with the knife tip, "And I will take care of, oh, everything." Jim made an expansive gesture. "Now. Be a good boy, Sebastian, and say thank you."

"Thank you," the Colonel muttered, unsure what he was thanking Jim for other than a compelling glimpse of psychopathy and his own bizarre libido. Perhaps it was merely the stay of execution; perhaps he was supposed to be displaying gratitude for a sudden pressing need to be alone and undressed. 

"Good," said Jim, patting him on the head as he withdrew the knife. "Oh, one other thing."

The Colonel gave him a wary look.

"I'm going to need you to take a little bit of mescaline before we get there."

* * *

The Colonel removed his pistol from the pocket of his coat and laid it on the sofa cushions beside him. He picked it up and put it back in his pocket. 

"—Purchase of One Tower Bridge by a Russian oil tycoon poses fresh questions about the rising quantity of London property owned by non-domiciled billionaires," said the TV, as the Colonel put his pistol on the sofa and shook his head. These places had metal detectors, after all. They probably wouldn't just bar him from entry, either. "Are Londoners being priced out of their own city?"

The Colonel looked at the blank and silent screen of his phone, and stuffed the pistol back into his pocket. If he was Jim's sole (wasted, severed) muscle, then he needed to be armed.

"Once again this is _the_ most expensive place to live, _on_ earth, and we have these terrible scenes of poverty reminiscent of the developing world—"

With an irritable twitch, the Colonel dropped the pistol onto the sofa cushions. As any number of soldiers could attest, stationed in desert nowhere and bored out of their minds, hallucinogens and firearms didn't mix in a wholesome or predictable way. 

He reached for the pistol again and his phone rang: Addison Lee. A nice, reputable taxi company.

"Yes," said the Colonel, abandoning the pistol to watch the financial news alone. "I'll be down."

He locked up behind him, and thumped down the stairs like a corpse being rolled down them.

Jim was waiting in the car. The driver looked conspicuously as if he'd not passed the CRB check portion of his hiring requirements. Or, if he worked directly for Jim, as if he'd passed it with flying colours.

He settled onto the back seat, which did his leg few favours, and the driver with the black and gold teeth and large neck tattoo took off with a screech.

"Joey here," said Jim, turning in his seat, "is my man for dealing with the Russians."

He didn’t explain any further, and Joey was too busy trying to violate every traffic law at once to elucidate on this gnomic utterance himself.

Jim reached back between the passenger and driver seats, and said, "Armed?" with his hand out, palm up.

"No."

"Good, then they won't shoot you." Jim didn’t sound especially bothered by this. He slipped his hand in his waistcoat pocket: today the suit was black, British cut, wool, sombre, and what even the Colonel would grudgingly accept was an exquisite and mature piece of tailoring. Conservative, not showy. The hand returned with a couple of fragments of blotting paper, each maybe a quarter of a postage stamp in size, minus any insignia.

The Colonel was quite sure these weren't the weak-soaked, skimping kind of tabs that got sold in clubs.

"You said mescaline," he said, as Joey tested the suspension on a speed bump at approximately sixty. His teeth clacked.

"Open wide," said Jim, lunging for the Colonel's nose to pinch it.

The Colonel leaned away from him.

Jim backhanded him in the temples so hard that his head bounced off the car door. Joey snickered and changed gear – the Colonel shook his head sharply and locked eyes with Jim.

"Either you trust me," said Jim, in a quiet, dangerous voice, his eyes very large and very dark, "or I will give you cause never to trust anything or anyone again."

The Colonel watched the black, flat eyes without expression, and lifted his left hand to pincer the acid tabs.

Jim knocked the hand away. "No," he said, and he plastered his palm over the Colonel's mouth, sprawling out of his seat to reach. With his other hand he gripped the back of the Colonel's head too tight, dug his fingers in to his scalp.

He had half-climbed out of his seat, shoved his face to the Colonel's ear.

"Swallow, Sebastian."

The Colonel was about to tell him that wasn't how acid worked, when he felt paper on his tongue and recognised defeat when it held him in an unflinching, vice-like grip and murmured threats like it was reciting love poetry.

* * *

At the doorway, Joey helped him stumble over the rim of a metal detector, returning to the car before he could snap at him that he didn't need his fucking assistance.

"Who the fuck is this?" asked the security guard, whose trainers were as brilliant white as the ones Jim had worn, blasphemously, with his beautiful suit.

Jim said something in Russian, and the guard laughed. The Colonel stamped obligingly after him, concentrating on his footing on the narrow, ill-lit stairs. So far, no visuals, only a mounting sense of dread and unsteadiness, and a lurid kind of sexual arousal that smacked of red lights and had a distinct undertone of untameable terror.

The Colonel followed Jim into a basement. There was a lot of red velvet, and a lot of men in trainers, and a lot of women in not very many clothes of any kind. The Colonel had a brief, vivid premonition of the death of each of the women, with their desperate smiles and very straight, highlighted hair. He knew the feel of their intestines, the heat of their blood, the angles at which they would lie. The idea spread through his mind in a tide of strobe lights and meat, leaving him nauseous and sweaty.

He leaned hard on the back of a sofa. Its occupant scowled at him and made a motion intended to frighten him off: the Colonel tried to make his muscles recall "attention" and made an effort to ignore the twitchy sensation that something was walking over his skin with a thousand tiny pin-prick feet.

Jim was deep in discussion. Even if it hadn't been in Russian the Colonel was sure he wouldn't have understood: his head swelled and shrank to the beat of shit R'n'B which could have been in any one of fifty different languages, and his mouth was horribly dry. The mounting sense of deep unease returned to him, and he tried to fight it like gas, or hiccups.

One of the dancers stopped beside him and said something from behind a blank, fixed grin. She looked at the sofas, but addressed herself to him.

The Colonel stared straight ahead, stricken with unfamiliar empathy. He wondered what she thought about while they were fucking her, and was treated to a powerfully fresh re-enactment – re-experience – in his own mind of the times he'd stared through someone's head like it was smoke, as they fucked him in a hole he'd blocked off all further access to, and called him by a name that wasn't his and never should have been.

Two men sitting opposite Jim came to some sort of conclusion. Jim turned and beckoned the Colonel over: with difficulty he complied, stepping precariously over pristine white trainers, feeling the uneven weight on his more lifelike prosthesis throw him off-balance. His youngest days at school: don't step on anyone's toes, [Caroline], just smile and be nice. The lack of equilibrium mingled with the ongoing menace in LSD-sharpened chambers of his brain, and the Colonel stood beside his employer with only a slender grip on his own self. He felt he might split into filaments at any minute, pour out an ugly tide of writhing, wriggling furies.

 _Tyger, tiger, burning bright_ … whispered a nagging voice overlaying his thoughts. He couldn't work out if it came from within or beside him.

"Show them your hand," said Jim. He seized the Colonel by the wrist ( _catch a tiger by its toe_ ) and yanked the hand – his left, of course – at the men seated about him, lapsing back into Russian. The pressure of his fingers, hot and tight, made the Colonel's skin squirm.

Sebastian swallowed, naked with his name and no rank, inside his suit, as Jim laid his thumb over his pulse. The idle gesture enraged, panicked, aroused. Four men in loose suits and white running shoes nodded curt appreciation.

One of them called over one of the girls. Her name sounded something like "cat". She had thin legs and a poker face that might never have displayed an expression at all. Sebastian caught her eye, but she was studiedly blank. Blood surged through Sebastian's head, filled with impulses: fire the place and tell them it was insurgents. Shoot first. _Run_.

The girl in the rhinestone bra, with her hair dyed to wisps, did a good job of concealing her trembling. Sebastian felt it rather than seeing it, felt it through the floor and the walls. He saw stripes on the curtains and thought, _there is a monster in this room. Is it me. It must be me. It will have to be me. It needs to be me._

A man with a mouth like an old scar stroked the girl called "cat"-something with the back of his hand. She contained a flinch. The other girls pointedly kept dancing. Sebastian smelled fear, and the stink of mountain leopards as found sometimes by the caves, though they never saw the beasts themselves. 

Old Scar Mouth produced a knife and Sebastian saw the tenor of dick-swinging contest as if it was written on the walls. He made an effort not to look at the walls. The thump of R'n'B sounded like a loud, deep purr: Jim's thumb dug into his wrist and made his left hand numb.

Cat gasped as her thigh sprouted the handle of a knife. Half cried out. Sebastian did not think of Isobel. He watched her clamp her hand over the wound, her mouth a distorted, silent "O" of pain, her eyes sad and shocked but dry, unpleading. The other girls were not dancing, but watching like cattle from the far side of a field. "Cat" slumped, but did not fall.

She braced the back of her leg with her other hand, and bent in half, bleeding.

Jim looked unimpressed. He made a dismissive gesture. The man with the slash of a mouth called one of the girls – two came, not looking at him. Dyed red hair, very straight. Fake breasts. They helped Cat to her feet, put her arms over their shoulders, muttered to her. They led her from the room, still bleeding.

A trail of dark blood across the pale carpet.

Sebastian thought, _how pointless_ , and internalised his sneer. Jim sneered openly. For a moment Sebastian was sure he could read minds or speak Russian for he understood Jim, there and then:

"Pathetic. You stabbed a hooker. You and every sad little psycho with sexy thoughts about his mummy. Do you see this man?"

Sebastian stood to attention. It was English, that was all. He ignored the stripe of blood on the carpet, the perpendicular line of Russian mouth Jim had just made an enemy of. Jangling nerves of self-preservationist stock collided with the acid and screeched at him to do something – punch someone, climb a wall, get out. 

Jim produced a gun.

Sebastian noticed even as the room breathed in and out like the lungs of some vast sea mammal and his bowels threatened to uncurl themselves from the habitual concrete violence of narcotic constipation, he wanted to laugh at the gentle movement away from his boss and his boss's standard, Army-issue Beretta.

It was nothing fancy. Army-issue Beretta from about fifteen years ago. Well-loved. Sebastian aligned his mind with the cool gunmetal muzzle, the familiar shape and imagined weight, as if he were holding it himself – even as his head rampaged through increasingly abstract landscapes of thought and belched up sad little memories of women bleeding from this or that wound. Roadside orphans. Pale blue headscarf soaked black with headwound blood. Isobel's face.

There was a thunderous shot. Several of the girls shrieked, and two men came running.

Sebastian looked down at his prosthetic, which was rather less intact than it had been, although the shot had passed the central supporting column without knicking it. "You bastard," he said, indistinctly. "I was using that."

One of the white-trainered Russians laughed. Another glared at Jim and said something icy.

Jim shot Old Scar Mouth in the shoulder.

While all hell broke loose, Sebastian leaned back on a nearby sofa and began to whistle the McDonald's jingle, over and over. He could hardly remember where he'd heard it.

He noticed two of the girls making for the door, mostly naked, smeared with blood, as determined as avalanches and utterly grim. He spotted Joey, armed with a knife which looked much like a British Army bayonet, and had the presence of mind to wonder if Joey was really here or not.

"Sebastian," Jim cooed, standing over the man he'd shot in the shoulder. "I've finished with this, tidy it up and make sure it doesn't bother me again."

Sebastian knelt on the Russian's stomach – it was closer than the floor – and pinched his windpipe shut with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. He balled up the right, and punched him in the eye.

Jim stepped back.

Sebastian drew back his fist, and some tide swelled within his breast like music. Joey, who still seemed to be here in some corporeal form, slipped in and out of curtained shadows, swearing in some vaguely Slavic tongue that only magnified his gleaming teeth and London accent and clear delight at the situation.

His fist went on hammering like a piston. He felt the eye beneath him give.

There was blood up his forearm. He felt the Russian scrabble at him with weakening hands, and pointed his one good knee more viciously into his viscera, and punched some more. And more. And more. And more.

Sebastian snarled.

Somewhere in the looseness of time that followed, blood passed over his face like the light of a passing car. Jim crooned to him. The throb and pull of the universe receded, and he found Joey helping him up the stairs, beaming manically.

He slumped in the back of Joey's taxi as it sped off, with no regard for traffic laws, police, or kerbs. His right hand looked like mincemeat. There were splinters sticking out of the once lifelike prosthetic leg. Sebastian stretched out awkwardly on the leather as Joey hurled them all joyfully at corners and his hand began at last to hurt.

"Was that another fucking test?" he asked, as the swimmy remnants of an altered state married with whirling streetlights to make vomit a near-certainty in the future.

Jim loomed off the passenger seat like a church gargoyle, so filled with threat that Sebastian almost choked on bile there and then. "That's for later," he said, his voice a low, soft purr, like an expensive engine.

"What the fuck was all that, then?"

"Foreplay," said Jim, and spat on him.

* * *

Had the Colonel not felt like something he'd thrown up for the next two days, had he not been disinclined to leave the flat and show off his brawler's scabby knuckles, had he not been subconsciously waiting for either the police or Jim, neither of whom deigned to harass him, he'd never have let Carrington pay him a home visit.

"I need a new leg," said the Colonel, slapping the titanium pole as the doctor made his own coffee.

"I'm glad you agree," said Carrington, "but you need to talk to Rita about that. You know where her surgery is."

The Colonel snorted. Carrington waved the Colonel's own cafetiere at him enquiringly.

"Do I look like I want to be awake?"

"You look bloody terrible," Carrington suggested, pouring his own. "What happened to the – actually, what have you done to your hand?"

"Some enthusiastic Army surgeon with a face like a mouldy potato and no professional dignity had a breakdown all over it and hacked off my fingers when they weren't gangrenous, doc," said the Colonel, with no small quantity of sarcasm. "I thought I'd told you."

Carrington only sighed and gave him the kind of look few people got the opportunity to give him twice. "If this is a plot for a Xanax prescription it's an effective one," he said, raising his eyebrows. "Anger management sessions might, on the whole, be worse for your therapist than they would be good for you."

The Colonel acknowledged this with a shrug. He recalled red light and dark stripes, and ran his thumb over the black scabs on his knuckles.

"Join us for a game tomorrow," Carrington suggested. "I'll stand you a starting bid, if you like."

"I'm alright," said the Colonel. The smell of his own very good coffee wafting up from Carrington's borrowed mug tugged at his gag reflex.

"Sit in," said Carrington. 

"You're not meant to encourage addictions," said the Colonel, a little sourly.

"I'd be a hypocrite not to," said Carrington. He sipped coffee. "Speaking of which, where are my souvenirs?"

The Colonel hauled himself to his feet – titanium and rubber, and flesh – and went to the broom cupboard. He took a muslin pouch out of the shoebox behind his Rifle No. 5 and returned, nudging the door shut behind him.

"You could just prescribe yourself something," he pointed out, dropping the bag on the sofa beside the now-seated doctor. 

"The marvels of nature far exceed the brute chemistry of my brethren in pharma," said Carrington, pocketing it. He sipped more of the Colonel's coffee. "And I'm liable to be caught that way. Home visits to a crotchety patient are less suspect and more rewarding."

The Colonel merely grunted. He didn't feel much comfortable with flinging himself down on the sofa in proximity to Carrington, and he wished the man would take his fucking opium and leave.

"Can I see your hand?" Carrington added, settling down on the sofa with the air of a man who intended to smoke his fucking opium right there and then.

The Colonel displayed his right middle finger to its fullest advantage.

"Well, that at least answers whether you can move all the digits," Carrington said, unruffled by this childish response. He drained the coffee mug and set it down on the floor beside his foot. "Including that one? Nothing broken. Not too swollen. When did you do this?"

"Couple of days ago," the Colonel admitted, sinking onto the uncomfortable armchair he usually backed visitors into. 

"Mm," said Carrington, squinting across the room at the hand under discussion. He had brown eyes, a complexion which spoke of Mediterranean holidays and ancestry, salt-and-pepper hair – in a vaguely supermarket calenderish way, not too bad-looking. "You cleaned it?"

The Colonel shrugged. He'd staggered in and pounded himself into a near-coma with painkillers and sleeping pills, and when he woke up it had scabbed over and he'd been unmoved to do much but sleep and shit since.

"It doesn't look inflamed," Carrington concluded, sitting forward to get a better view. "But if you're going to keep assaulting things bare-handed, take care you don't get anything in the wound. Grit can cause tetanus and…" he gave the Colonel a penetrating look, "human saliva is particularly nasty. Try not to punch anyone in the teeth, they're covered in bacteria."

The Colonel stared at him for a minute. The doctor averted his gaze, and said lightly, "You don't have to be a forensic expert to recognise tooth impressions, Moran, and it's not like you can afford to lose any more fingers."

* * *

The police made no move in his direction. The Colonel relaxed enough to go to his Club and eat a ferocious quantity of boarding-school-quality curry.

"Crossword help," said Williams, squatting beside the Colonel's armchair just as he'd been about to fall asleep. "Thought you'd know. Wiggins said you used to be a sniper."

The Colonel grunted, and waited for the question. Williams looked like something that had been peeled and rubbed with salt. Once a paramedic in Hong Kong; went to the right sort of school for Club admission. Caught in an unexpected blowback, lost most of the skin on his upper body. Doggedly friendly and upbeat in poor cover for his howling depression and certain knowledge that everyone he spoke to was repulsed by his pink, shiny, distorted face. In for more reconstructive surgery in France next month. Williams was a book held open with staples, unable to let himself be private, constantly begging to be read.

"Eight down," said Williams, "game hunting; favoured for big cats. Five letters."

The Colonel closed his eyes to keep out a smile that reminded him of disconcerting acid dreams. "Doesn't say it's a rifle," he pointed out. "I don't hunt. Not allowed." That and big game hunting was more properly "shooting fish in a barrel". Lions walked right up to the jeep. Tigers moved for nothing and nobody. Only lazy cowards shot cats. Humans, squirrels, bids on the wing – the fast-moving, small, or well-armed were the real challenge to the sportsman. Maybe an oncoming elk, for the adrenaline.

He thought of Isobel and shook his head.

"'Spear' doesn't fit with any of the options for fifteen across," Williams lamented. “Er, oh. Ten across: emotional fascination. Something, something, F, something, something, something, A, something, T something, something…"

The Colonel drummed his middle left knuckle stump on the arm of the chair. He opened one eye, caught a glimpse of the hallucinogenically bothersome face of Williams again, and hastily closed it. 

"Infatuated," he said, at last.

"Oh yes," said Williams, as he scribbled on the newspaper. "Which makes _that_ one 'benediction', and that one… _traps_ , yes. Good job. Thanks, Moran."

The Colonel only grunted and pretended he was falling asleep again. The weight of three helpings of balti ought to have sunk him into pleasant immobility, but he had a sense of having been found out that made him hot and cold with sudden shame.

"Fuck you," he said quietly to himself, getting up slowly. " _Call me_."

* * *

Sky News reported the theft of a sixteenth-century gold-plated Italian bible from the British Museum, and the Colonel looked up from picking scabs from his hand with abrupt interest. Absolute certainty struck him like a football to the face: this was related.

He had no idea how or why, but something about it said "Jim" in a language he was still a novice in.

The Colonel, who had abandoned his breakfast as inedible half an hour ago, began to dress himself with one eye on the screen. Police baffled. Security guards questioned. Alarm manufacturer released a statement. Head of international museum cooperation giving a worried statement. Volubly upset man from the Italian museum addressing the camera in increasingly bad English. 

The Colonel twitched up his one sock.

Photograph of the missing bible. The Blood of Christ represented by twelve rubies. An enamel scene on the rear which was probably taken from an earlier work by Anglo-Saxon workers in the seventh century, and the reason for it being on loan to the Museum as part of the Recycled Treasures exhibition, now a crime scene.

The Colonel tried to finish coffee he'd already finished and swore at the TV. "Come _on_."

"We suspect," said a spokeswoman for the Met, "that this is a burglary done to order. While the individual components have intrinsic value the item as a historical piece is what's worth this degree of planning and risk."

"Yes," said the Colonel.

His phone buzzed.

> Miss me?

The Colonel snorted.

> You're on TV.

.

The segment ended, and threats of less interesting matter after the ad break arose. The Colonel adjusted a brogue on his false foot.

> I owe you a leg.

Yes, the Colonel thought, and several nights' sleep uncontaminated by weird dreams. His brain hadn't liked the LSD and his body hadn't liked his attempts at sleep-walking.

There was a loud car horn blast outside. It carried over the general din of traffic and rattled the single pane of glass in the Colonel's Georgian window.

He checked his phone again.

> Hurry up.

The Colonel thumped down the stairs as quickly as concerns over not breaking his neck would let him; there was a cold transport van taking up most of the narrow street. It had "Wally's Wet Goods & Chilled Foods" stencilled on the side.

Clad in a baseball cap and blue overalls, Jim leaned out of the passenger window. "We're going to Hereford," he said, and moved over to let the Colonel squirm onto the window seat. He didn’t offer to help, but as, the Colonel steadied himself, seized his left wrist and pulled him off-balance.

"What am I doing?" the Colonel asked, when they were under way.

"Learning how to use cheese wire," said Jim, looking at Google Maps on his phone as Joey, in an outfit to match Jim's own, got them under way. 

The Colonel nodded. "Do I have time for fifty winks?"

"It's three fucking hours," said Jim, still looking at the map. "You've got time to write a novel, but if you fall asleep on me I'll shove your foot down your throat until it sticks out your urethra."

"I'll leave the Velcro undone for you," the Colonel said, and went to sleep.

* * *

In a lay-by outside the alleged city, the cold storage van stopped, and the Colonel woke from a doze. His half-dreaming state had been fraught with images of burning buildings and the sensation of several conflicting sexual urges, most of which made him feel like shit, so he was little upset at being woken.

"Since you didn't dress for the occasion," Jim told him, leaning over to open the door, "you're going to ride the last _leg_ in the back." He paused, and said, "Joey, you drive like you've never heard of third gear and we'll be grand. I _said_ , get in the back."

The Colonel opened the back door of the van. Cold air boiled out like a physical blow and obscured his vision for a moment, leaving him blinking with stinging eyes, but as soon as he could see to do it, he climbed laboriously in.

Someone outside slammed the door, and the Colonel immediately wished he'd worn a coat. And gloves. And a layer of subcutaneous fat. 

The van started up. At least there was a light. 

The Colonel braced himself against an internal shelf – metal, cold enough to burn his skin – and looked down into the wide blue eyes of a gagged and bound woman with short brown hair.

He blinked.

She gave him a pleading look.

The Colonel thought she looked vaguely familiar, but couldn’t say where he might have seen her before. She had the right figure – from what he could make out – for television, but her face didn't ring any bells loudly enough for him to recall a program or a name. 

Joey was taking corners less like a fourteen-year-old boy racer now, which the Colonel supposed meant they were less likely to be stopped by the police.

He looked back down at the woman. He wondered what she'd done to merit the application of cheese wire, and reminded himself that this avenue of thought was never rewarding.

Joey went over a cattle grid.

The Colonel put one hand in his trouser pocket in an attempt to ward off what felt like frostbite. He stared at the woman on the floor, who was shivering, and the woman on the floor stared up at him. 

She made another attempt to communicate something through her gag, and rocked back and forth on the van floor.

The Colonel thought about hunting cats. Five letters? He thought about Jim, talking in Russian. He thought about Carrington's recommendation of valium, Xanax, something. He thought about how cold he was. 

The van stopped.

The Colonel straightened up and blew on what was left of his fingers. The door opened, and Joey flashed his teeth.

"We got'n audience," Joey explained, stomping past him to stick his hands into the woman's armpits. "Grab a leg. Ha ha."

The woman shrieked into her gag and thrashed about like a worm trying to avoid a hook. The Colonel stooped awkwardly and seized her feet.

"Audience?" he asked, as Joey backed down the van.

"Mister Mortiarty," said Joey, intoning the name like a talisman, "is n'agency. You, me, contractors. Sometimes the man who hires contractors wants to watch." He shook his head, and stepped off the back of the van, dropping about two feet straight down.

The woman bucked and almost succeeded in hitting the Colonel in the face.

They came out into a barn. The Colonel could tell it was a barn because it smelled of cow shit and agricultural diesel and there were bits of tractor at the back of it, gathering dust. There were also two high-backed leather armchairs of the sort that were typically found in the Colonels's Club, side by side, facing the van. There was a small coffee table of dubious provenance between them. A bottle of good wine. Two glasses.

The Colonel dropped the woman's feet, climbed to the floor, and helped Joey carry the struggling parcel of person to a spot helpfully marked with an X in masking tape.

He glanced about to find Jim, but could see no one but Joey and the frantic, muffled woman on the floor. She wore jeans and a t-shirt. Her feet were bare, toenails carrying the remnants of blue nail polish.

Joey dumped his end of their shared burden and went back into the front of the van, leaving the Colonel once again to gaze down on a faintly-familiar woman in the throes of acute desperation, albeit in a slightly less chilly environment this time.

He put his hands in his pockets and thought about it. "Do I _know_ you from somewhere?"

She hesitated a second, then nodded hastily, eyes wide.

Joey returned with a standard issue navy blue tool box, and dropped it at his feet. He gave the Colonel an unwanted conspiratorial nudge in the ribs. "Just act like you know what you do," he said, his accent an abrasive blend of London Geezer and whatever he'd been speaking at the nightclub. Joey tipped the Colonel a wink, and added, "Now you're the big favourite. Don't fuck up now."

This did little for the Colonel's confidence. Joey leaned back on the doors of the van and waited, hands spread in a comic gesture of innocence. The Colonel frowned at the woman on the floor, who had deflated from her tense hope and seemed to have resigned herself to whatever fate awaited her.

Presently, Jim came in from the back of the barn, accompanied by an entirely-forgettable-looking slender man in an expensive suit and rimless glasses. He looked like an accountant who'd done very well for himself; Jim had shed his blue overalls in favour of an elegant suit of his own, which made him look taller, and was deep in conversation, one hand in his pocket and the other offering restrained commentary in the form of gesticulation. Even without the low murmur of his voice the Colonel knew a sales pitch when he saw one.

"Ordinarily," Jim said, "my role is facilitator. I put people in touch with people, and for an additional fee I'll structure a project for you, derive outcomes from raw materials, or organise needs and manpower in respect of your stated goals. You're familiar with the form. There are few sectors I don't cover."

The non-descript man nodded. They sat down in the armchairs: Jim twitched his trousers up his thighs like a man who'd been wearing tailored suits his whole life, but the accountant didn't.

"Today," said Jim, "I'd like to provide a demonstration of two services at once. The first is a speciality service offered at an introductory rate for problematic parties—" here he gestured at the bound and gagged woman on the floor, "and the second is something I'm phasing in at present. Sebastian, cheese wire."

Jim settled back on his chair and smiled a small and private smile at the Colonel, whose face heated slowly on its receipt. He reached into the tool box and took out the short length – two feet at most – of cheese wire, with its helpful artisan wooden handles at each end. There were a number of other tools in the box which he determined not to look at. 

"What happened to his hand?" asked the accountant, loudly.

"Disciplinary issues," said Jim peacefully. "Alright, Colonel. I'll let you know."

"One second," said the accountant, sitting forward on his seat. "Can you ungag her? No one's going to hear around here."

Jim said, "Sure," a little pissily, and nodded to the Colonel.

The Colonel removed the woman's gag with difficulty. As soon as he'd got the rubber bit out of her teeth she blurted:

" _God_ \-- Caro – it's me—it's Pippa—please—don't listen to him—please—you've got to help me—"

The Colonel took a step back and cast an enquiring look at the two chairs. The accountant fidgeted, adjusted his tie, and opened his mouth to say something.

"He only takes instruction from me," said Jim, which was news to the Colonel. It was spoken in a tone of voice which reached right into his guts and pressed them with a warm hand. "But feel free to make a _suggestion_."

"Caroline—please—" repeated Pippa Woodhouse, turning an imploring gaze up at the Colonel. The Colonel turned his own more fully on Jim. "CARO! Don't don't this – this is nuts – I haven't _done_ anything – oh God—"

Jim rolled his eyes. "For God's sake, Sebastian, darling, just cut out her tongue before we get going, this is tedious."

The Colonel considered the problem for a moment, and made an attempt to wedge Pippa's mouth open with his fingers. It was hot and wet and, given the circumstances of his most pin-sharp memory of Pippa, disconcerting. She clenched her jaw shut and breathed violently through a gap in her teeth, meeting his gaze with watery intensity. Her nostrils flared with the effort of holding her teeth together.

The Colonel sighed and punched her in the trachea with his thumb. When her mouth split open in pained surprise, he shoved his left hand in so fat that she choked, and, elbows raised comically, foot clamped down on one of her thighs, he passed a loop of wire around the base of her tongue.

It cut his fingers. She gurgled, trying to force him out of her mouth by working her jaw, by jerking her head, by twisting her tongue about. The Colonel swore at her, contemplated headbutting her into submission.

"Come _along_ , Basher, you've got lots to do," Jim chided.

There was an echoing _glob, glob, glob_ of wine being poured, twice over.

The Colonel pulled the loop tight, yanking his hands out of Pippa's mouth. The wire sliced him again, cut her lips. She gurgled a little more, struggled. He let the handles drop against her chest and pulled her into a sitting position by the hair.

"Spit it out," he muttered, as blood seeped past the wire ends. She fixed her eyes on him and shook her head weakly, eyes red, chin scarlet.

The Colonel put both handles in his right hand and pulled.

Pippa choked, gurgled, and disgorged the wire, the lump of flesh the size of a small, cooked lamb chop. It bounced off her chest and into her lap.

He let her fall, and picked up the wire.

"Ears next, do you think?" Jim asked. The Colonel turned in time to see him sip what looked like a rather good red, although what variety he couldn't make out. Jim tilted the glass at him in a mocking toast, and the Colonel felt his face grow warm again.

He looked down at Pippa, who was shaking. He couldn't tell if she was laughing or crying: the convulsions were spasmodic, and her half-bloodied face wore an expression that could have been a grin or a grimace but was fixed on some point well beyond the barn.

The Colonel bent down with difficulty and hugged Pippa to his chest, arms laced through her armpits as he dragged her closer to the van. He propped her against him, and made a fresh loop of wire, hands wet and red as the aftermath of an IED in a schoolroom.

As he straightened up he caught Jim's eye. His expression was dark: there was no laughing voyeuristic enjoyment in that moment, but a kind of black bitter fury emanating from the depths of his eyes that chilled the Colonel to the pit of his gut. It ought to have scared the piss out of him for longer, but once he'd found a name for the expression directed at him, he almost whooped in heartfelt triumph. 

The Colonel worked the loop around Pippa's ear, felt her twitch. Pulled it tight: felt her jerk. Looked up at Jim. Held his gaze. Kissed Pippa on the top of her head. Felt her flinch: saw Jim's gaze darken again.

The loop of wire tightened. Thick as the tongue had been, this was harder. Sharp though the wire undoubtedly was – his hands hardly hurt, though his blood and Pippa's covered them in an equal ratio – it took a moment of sawing back and forth.

Pippa twitched and jerked, but no longer bucked and writhed. It was clear, the Colonel thought, with contempt, that she'd resigned herself, or merely mentally departed. He threw the ear to one side, and tossed another sharp loop around the stalk of the other.

His suit was bloody – the Colonel doubted it was salvageable now. The spectre of Dr Carrington appeared in his mind, scolding him to wash his hands in hibiscrub or risk losing more fingers. _And if you can't get hibiscrub, try Dettol._

The other ear fell onto his sleeve. He flicked it onto the floor, and looked to Jim expectantly. Jim gave him a brief appraisal.

"Alright," he sighed, sounding bored. "Cut her throat."

The Colonel slipped the wire in front of her windpipe. It would be quicker, he assumed, than the jugular, and his suit was ruined enough without drenching it under arterial spray.

Pippa's lips moved faintly. She looked, upside-down from his perspective, like a scribble. Red smeared her face from his hands, painted her hair and soaked her t-shirt. 

She moved her lips again, and tried to catch his eye.

The Colonel pulled the wire tight.

For a moment she kicked like a snared rabbit, but the wire was sharp and her skin wasn't as thick as game. It sank into her flesh, and as he felt her neck give in to the leading edge, he loosened his grip a little.

There was one last gurgling, sucking noise. A sound like someone pulling their foot out of viscous mud. The Colonel let her go, and stood back.

Pippa twitched and curved. The Colonel looked up at Jim and the accountant. Both had their eyebrows raised: Jim with a small smirk, the accountant with a neutral mouth and his wine glass raised.

Jim stood, as Pippa gasped and flopped more feebly. 

"Wait in the van," he said, gesturing to the cab.

The Colonel did as he was told. Joey was dozing in the driver's seat – the Colonel did his best to wipe his face with a packet of tissues wedged between them.

Sounds carried in the barn. He heard the accountant say: "Early days yet."

Jim said, "He's a sniper. I'm experimenting with flexibility. Now what I _can_ offer you is a comprehensive clean-up service, who will be here in under an hour – at least two forensics-trained operatives on the team – and a choice of personnel for your current project."

The Colonel scrubbed at his face with a damp tissue and strained his ears. If Pippa wasn't the accountant's aim or request, his "project", he wanted to know why exactly she'd been here. It didn't seem much like a coincidence to him, not after Isobel.

"Where's the short one from?"

"Ex-Army sniper," Jim raised his voice. "Takes orders well, of course."

The accountant said, "Is he available?"

The Colonel held his breath.

"I'm still training him," said Jim. "Joey, on the other hand, comes with a full set of testimonials and a penchant for gutting Russians – grew up in Grozny – a clean driver's license including HGVs, a dirty past, and my blessing."

There was a pause. "Who was the girl?"

" _Now_ , Mr Fielding, you know we don't discuss other people's business."

"It was very impressive."

"Good."

"I'll take the driver, then."

Jim raised his voice, and a moment later the Colonel realised he had only drawn closer to the cab. "Joey, Mr Fielding is going to borrow you. Standard rates and a bit of overtime."

Joey roused himself and slipped out of the cab. Jim gave the Colonel an unsettling smile. "You'd better be able to drive."

The Colonel hadn't driven since he lost his leg. There had been some talk of getting him a car suited to his situation, but since he'd stopped bothering with physio and fallen out with Arbuthnot that had gone out of the window. And he'd never driven an HGV – his real talent in several deployments had been drunkenly smashing jeeps into unstable buildings. 

He looked at Jim, and got out of the cab.

He got into the driver's seat.

"Wonderful," said Jim, dryly. "Joey—"

Joey reappeared.

"Call Rick Best and tell him to bring the scouring pads."

Joey vanished.

"Clunk-click," said Jim, failing to put on his seatbelt. "We're leaving. Go."

It took the Colonel a nerve-wrackingly long time to get the van moving. He wasn’t exactly helped by Jim staring intensely at the side of his head and muttering, "You've got blood under your chin," falling silent, the adding in a low monotone, "nice."

When he had the mastery of the machine he backed them slowly out of the barn and onto an extremely rural road. Jim consulted his phone.

"East," said Jim, pointing South without looking up.

"That's South."

"Compromise," said Jim.

"Good thing this runs south-east," muttered the Colonel, accelerating too quickly.

* * *

They'd made the motorway by the time the suspense finally got to him. "Alright," the Colonel said, as the van juddered along in the fast lane, being beeped at by Maseratis, "what was all that?"

"Shop talk," said Jim, warningly.

"Why her?" the Colonel persisted. He was amazed no one was taking more notice of his appearance, but a quick glance in the mirror told him his face was clean and he only looked like he was wearing a vivid red shirt with his suit now.

Jim leaned across the gap between their seats. The Colonel caught his breath.

"Nosy boys lose their noses." 

He tweaked the Colonel's.

"I'm not good enough for agency work," the Colonel concluded somewhat bitterly, with a sideways glance. 

Jim yawned. "Don't try to manipulate me, Sebastian, you're no good at it."

The Colonel tapped the wheel with the remaining fingers on his left hand. "He'd have taken me on."

"It's not his choice."

"And not mine either?"

Jim gave him a dangerous smile. It was the kind of smile that broke necks. "I could have you torn into shreds and nailed to the Tate Modern," he said, in a low and disturbingly sexual voice. "I hold the key to your freedom and your _life_ in my hands. Dr Carrington could find himself suddenly indisposed to supply you with any more testosterone. The police might abruptly trace the round that felled Isobel Blakeney. The only 'choice' you have to make, Sebastian, is how difficult you want your life to be and how long you want it to last."

The Colonel nodded. He took his life recklessly by the scruff, and said, "You don't own me."

Jim moved so quickly that he had no time to respond. Despite doing a solid seventy-five in traffic, it seemed Jim had no qualms about grabbing the Colonel by the head and slamming his face into the steering wheel hard enough to burst blood vessels.

" _Fuck_ ," the Colonel blurted, spraying blood as the van swerved through two lanes of traffic and every vehicle in half a mile honked angrily. He wrestled the van back into its lane, and the wire cuts on his hands reopened. "Fuck."

"I own you," said Jim, quietly.

"Fine," said the Colonel, gripping the wheel like a lifeline. "Why did you use Pippa for your demonstration? What's she done?"

"Sebastian. Darling." Jim's tone could cut glass. "You're going to be a regrettably short dalliance if you keep asking questions."

"Tell me."

"You're going to be even more truncated if you try to give me orders," said Jim, with a tight smile that could have sliced off his remaining fingers. "Do you _really_ need to know?"

The Colonel took his eyes of the road for a moment. "Yes," he said, locking gazes with black holes dominating Jim's face.

"Alright," said Jim with a gentle shrug. He took a knife out of the glove compartment and laid it across his lap. It was a very ordinary knife, not like the bayonet Joey had been inserting into various Russians while the Colonel's head span with acid; more like a much-used, much-sharpened kitchen knife from somewhere where the head chef was particular about his or her equipment. There was a yellow dot of paint on the handle, presumably to identify it among its brethren. "We're going to play an exciting game. For every question I answer about your stupid Pippa, I get to stab you in the leg."

The Colonel took his eyes off the road again. "So I'm a Russian prostitute?"

"She was Ukrainian, and you're my property," said Jim. "So you will earn your answers."

Still reeling from a sudden and brutal facial injury, trying to keep the van on the road, the Colonel acknowledged that there was no 'get to' in the situation. If Jim wanted to stab him repeatedly in the thigh there wasn't a great deal he could do to stop him, and any attempt he made would only make everything worse.

_Fie! Cried the man in quicksand, "I might as well swim downward."_

Jim positioned the tip of the knife delicately over the outside of the Colonel's thigh. He made a magnanimous gesture. "Go on."

The Colonel gritted his teeth and braced himself at the wheel, though quite certain that neither would help. He said: "Why did you choose Pippa for that demonstration?"

Jim sighed, and drove the knife down into the Colonel's leg.

The Colonel jumped, the van surged, and he bent double over the wheel, clutching at it with both hands. Sweat formed on his face: when he could stand to look and the vibrating waves of agony spreading out from his leg allowed him to process what he was seeing, he knew it hadn't penetrated very far. Just far enough to hurt, and to bleed, and to be a genuine danger to his life. 

Jim balanced the tip of his finger on the protruding handle-tip of the knife. "I don't approve of your friends."

"She wasn't my friend."

Jim smirked, slowly. "No, that's right. You don't have friends. You just bully and bulldoze people until they do what you want. You think they're pathetic and tiresome and their affection is a weakness."

"Why her?" The Colonel asked, half an eye on the road and half on his damp leg. He could feel his heart beat in his mouth, somewhere under his tongue. 

Jim pulled out the knife. A shadow spilled out across the leg of the Colonel's trousers and he knew before the blade descended again that it was coming: a fresh shock of pain, so close to the first that it might as well have been in the same wound.

"You're no good to me if you won't do as you're told," Jim said.

"That's not an answer," the Colonel said, slowing as a wall of cars crept up before them: a bottle-neck of bored drivers and articulated lorries, and somewhere in the distance presumably a set of temporary traffic lights.

Jim's smile spread out and became even more dangerous. "You know why her."

"How?"

"That's another question," said Jim. "Do you really want to bleed out before we get where we're going?"

The Colonel mustered all of his self-preservation instinct and drowned it violently in indifference. He shrugged.

Jim leaned on the knife blade. "I have my ways of finding these things out."

The Colonel nodded. The traffic in front idled with insolent indolence, blocking him from hospital, destinations, and respite.

"Aren't you going to ask about Isobel?"

The Colonel shook his head. He lead his face – sore, aching, bloody, disoriented – on the steering wheel. "I get the idea."

Jim snapped, "Sit up."

The Colonel wrenched himself upright. His leg throbbed, his head span, and his heart pounded. "Is this another test?"

Jim smiled a wan smile and jerked the handle back and forth without removing it. The Colonel bit his lip, swallowed, and let the waves of pain – diminishing in strength – wash over him like a red tide. 

"Would you like to know if you're failing?"

The Colonel stared ahead. The traffic was on the move again, red lights winking like demonic eyes in the gathering dark. He pressed down on the accelerator, and felt the tear of his muscle around the knife blade. He wondered what would happen when they passed the police, his shirt stiff with Pippa's blood and his leg appended with an unnatural growth, even for a man with a prosthesis.

The van rumbled forward.

"Answer me," Jim snapped.

"What happens if I don't answer you?" the Colonel asked, as the cars ahead began to speed up.

Jim leaned over his blood-soaked thigh and put his face so close to the Colonel's that he was obliged to hold his breath. He said in a voice that sounded like the most lurid, unspeakable come-on: "I cut your other fucking leg off."

The Colonel digested this. "Am I failing the test?"

Jim pinged the knife handle gravely. "I'll tell you in the morning."

* * *

They did not drive to a hospital.

Jim made him drive to a hotel in a town the Colonel was sure he'd never heard of, but which apparently had enough through traffic to merit the building and maintenance of a Travelodge. It offended him on every conceivable level, from the aesthetic (drab grey concrete from an architectural period somewhere in the mid-nineties) through to the convenient ("What do you mean you don't have a fucking elevator?" he snarled at the receptionist, clutching his thigh and his temper with loosening grip, "Don't you have any rooms on the ground floor? I'm fucking _disabled_ \--"), with a wide and ambling journey through the varied depths of his snobbery.

"I've been in bombed-out buildings that were less disgusting than this," the Colonel pronounced, lying on a pristine white bed and promptly ruining it with blood.

"Don't be such a drama queen," Jim offered, smirking at him. The Colonel couldn't see the damn knife that was the source of all the woes not inflicted upon him by an exceptionally mediocre hotel, but he had a strong inkling that Jim still had it very much on his person.

The Colonel gave him a pointed look, which Jim utterly ignored. 

"Take off your trousers," Jim said, without explanation. "And your leg."

Fumble-fingered and light-headed from pain, shock, and possibly from blood loss – although the Colonel supposed he hadn't lost enough for anything much of that sort to matter – he worked at his trousers and at the straps of his prosthesis, which were going to need disinfecting at some future point given how much blood had soaked into them.

With a small gesture of triumph he laid his trousers and leg on the bed beside him. Jim threw them on the floor.

"Shirt," Jim said, wandering away from the bed again.

The Colonel considered his shirt for a while, and ripped all the buttons off. It wasn't as if there was much chance of wearing it again. 

"See, now you're just being a drama queen again," Jim said, clicking his tongue.

"It's unwearable."

"Sebastian, my darling, if I tell you to walk into a burning building, you do it. If I tell you to walk into Lady Wortley's birthday celebrations dressed in a binliner and some vomit, _you do it_." Jim didn't produce the knife, but the blade came into his tone and into his eyes when he spoke. The void behind his black eyes was, the Colonel was sure, inhabited by the kind of monsters his imagination wasn't equipped to describe. 

He nodded.

"Now," said Jim, materialising next to the bed with a smile that had no relationship to anything sexual, "off with that vest of yours, Colonel Moran."

The Colonel removed the penultimate barrier to nudity and stared definitely at the man who was paying him to murder his way through all of his friends and former fucks. He pressed his hand over the wound without breaking eye contact, but Jim shoved his palm out of the way. 

"Underpants. And if I tell you to walk downstairs like this?"

The Colonel rolled his eyes. "I _hop_ very slowly to reception and explain that the weirdo I came in with is holding me hostage."

Jim gifted him with a deeply unfriendly smile, and smacked his fingers away as he tried again to cover a wound which was still intermittently bleeding. "Do as you're told."

"Or you'll kill me?"

"Or I will."

The Colonel removed his underpants, and dick, with clumsy hands. "I thought we had established that I don't particularly object to that outcome?"

Jim inspected him with the eye of a man assessing stolen goods. "Lie down and shut up."

The Colonel did as he was told. He did not comment that even over the smell of his own blood, which was omnipresent, and sweat, which was overpowering, the detergent used on the hotel sheets smelled cheap and of hen parties. He did not mention again the admission, which had cost his mind more than he realised, of his indifference to death. He said nothing, and only stared at the ceiling, and waited to find out what the hell Jim was going to do to him now.

Someone in the corridor banged shut the one door in the place that wasn't set to close on a weight-timer. Then they banged it open again.

The bed dipped. The Colonel maintained a steady gaze at the distant, white-painted ceiling. For a moment he pretended he was still in hospital, but the sheets there had smelled different and they'd been kind enough to keep him on a high enough dose of intravenous morphine that the pain currently dizzying him would not have had its equal there. He supposed Jim had climbed on the bed but for all he knew the man had thrown a dog carcass on there: it wasn't as if he was in the habit of being predictable.

A moment later his view of the ceiling was obliterated by Jim's face, and the cold air on his chest was obliterated by the top half of a body. The mattress beside his head sprouted a knife. Jim said, "Stop ignoring me."

Before he could respond the spectre of his boss had vanished again, leaving only an unnatural metallic growth protruding from the cheaply-washed sheets. Certain hands – very warm – lifted his left thigh until it belched blood again. He felt the muscle tense against all sense, and the flow of blood and pain across what remained of his leg.

One hand remained holding his thigh. The other brushed briefly over the scar of his constructed taint. Downward. Touched the hairs around his arsehole but not the skin. Vanished again, and seized his left wrist in a grip that could have ground the bones to dust.

"Wha—" the Colonel began, but the only explanation he received was an impatient tug on his wrist. One warm hand positioned the almost-whole middle finger of his left hand carefully against the rim of his arsehole, and patted him absently on the wrist. Returned to his thigh.

The Colonel scowled at the ceiling, his heart thumping. 

Jim ran his forefinger and middle finger along the edges of the wound he had inflicted. The Colonel swallowed convulsively, and a suspicion began to form in his mind.

"Before you got it sewn up," Jim said, in a voice the Colonel would have been forced to describe as 'languorous' for Williams's crossword, though nothing about the situation should have merited that tone, "how many people fucked you in it?"

"Why does that matter," the Colonel said, through clenched jaws, as Jim ran his fingers back down the sides of the stab wound in his thigh.

"It doesn't," said Jim. "Answer me."

"I don't know."

"You don't remember." Jim ran the tip of his finger down the centre of the wound, or somewhere between the two edges – it made no difference beyond the way it made the Colonel jerk and grab frantically at nothing with both hands. "Put your hands back where they were," Jim added, the voice of perfect, slow calm. 

The Colonel complied with difficulty. "No," he said, after a while, when he'd regained the ability to respond. "I don't remember."

"And where your finger is now?"

"Some."

Jim's voice dropped into something like a purr. "And where _my_ finger is now?" he asked, rubbing along the mess he'd made of the Colonel's thigh. 

" _None_ ," the Colonel barked, convinced more than ever that Jim inhabited some red-hot wilderness far beyond insanity. "Are you fucking—"

"Shut up, Sebastian," Jim said easily, jabbing him in the wound with a finger or thumb.

Sebastian – stripped of his rank as effortlessly as a blink of the eye – arched his back and kicked both legs. The right thrashed hopelessly against the mattress and the left jerked in a tight grip. He bit his tongue.

"Look at me," Jim added.

It took Sebastian a moment to struggle up on his elbow – without dislodging his finger from its stupid position, without hurting himself any more, without straining his neck – his stomach muscles ached and burned as he held himself up – and catch Jim's eye, but at least the man waited for him.

Jim gave him a bleak, distant smile that seemed almost tinged with sadness, and inserted his index finger into his own mouth. The black holes in his face didn't blink. He removed the finger, and slid it – as slowly and gently as a doctor – into the knife wound he had made.

Sebastian made a few sounds with which he'd become familiar during the brief time without morphine in the back of a jeep, with cellulitis and a bone fragment holding a vigil over a major vein. When he could focus again, Jim was smiling at him the serene and sweet smile of the Virgin _bloody_ Mary.

"Your turn."

"I don't—" Sebastian waded through the English language and grappled with the phrase _I don't understand_ , until Jim explained in words of one syllable what he expected of him.

Sebastian put his middle left finger in his mouth. He made a careful attempt not to bite down on it when Jim – with a mischievous smirk - _wiggled_ his bloody fucking finger inside Sebastian's thigh. He removed the mostly-intact finger, and without pausing to consider anything, slid it into an arsehole constricted with pain and perhaps just a little fear.

"Oh," he said.

Jim wiggled his finger again, and Sebastian roared, throwing his head back.

"Nice," Jim said, the same way that he'd said 'nice' about Sebastian's missing fingers, the way he'd said 'nice' about the scars on his chest, the way, Sebastian realised, he'd been saying it about Sebastian in general for some time. The damage attracted him like a shark to chummed water; he'd come because he knew there was something there for him in the stitching that made such a piss-poor job of holding Sebastian together. Someone else had done most of the hard work for him.

As quickly as it came, the epiphany shrank away; something that was probably not a finger touched him gently on the thigh. With things as they were, this was enough to grind his teeth in another white lightning-bolt of pain – his nerves no longer discriminating between the wound and the surrounds or indeed the majority of his lower body. He felt his arsehole contract again around his finger and tried to breathe.

"What…the…hell…" Sebastian grunted, trying to lift his head.

"I realise you're not as familiar as you might like," said Jim, with an unpleasant snicker, "but in medical circles it's known as a penis."

"Fuck-off—"

"Now is that _really_ what you want?" Jim asked, hunched over him. The underside – Sebastian assumed – of his penis rubbed along the length of the wound, leaving him with absolutely no ability to determined what he wanted, who he was, or anything more concrete than a howl of indignant pain as his body clutched at itself. 

His right hand wandered in agonised convulsions over the sheet. His left remained in the hot embrace of his arse. 

Jim said, "I thought not."

Sebastian inhaled and exhaled, inhaled and exhaled, and seized the edge of the mattress.

The sensation of a dick entering his leg was so painful, so bizarre, that his concept of normality gave up and left the scene at that moment. He barely registered the tightening of his arse around his knuckle, barely felt anything at all for a long moment where he was sure he had been jolted out of his body and out of his life. Was nearly certain he could see himself laid out beneath himself, Jim fucking a hole in his leg, the empty hotel room. The blood staining the sheets. His own open eyes, open mouth. 

_I look ridiculous_.

Jim sank sharp fingers into his hipbones, pulling himself in deeper. 

_I look dead_.

"You're going to hit a fucking vein," he said, in a far-away voice. 

"Fuck off," Jim suggested, and the breathiness in his voice jolted Sebastian back into his body like a blow with an industrial mallet. He was suddenly, cartoonishly, inescapably aware of a fact he hadn't considered before: there was an erect penis in his leg muscles, which meant that there was some part of Jim – probably quite a large fucking part – which was getting off on this.

"Carrington isn't going to be impressed," he added, and he sounded dreamy even to himself. _Human saliva,_ Carrington had said. God only knew what semen did.

"Why would he know the first fucking thing about it," Jim grunted, and his hands dug deeper into the fat on Sebastian's hips. It felt as if his fingers were scraping ruts in the iliac crests themselves, scouring reminders of his presence into Sebastian's bones. As if he needed that kind of reminder. As if he wasn't going to carry the scars of this encounter, the literal scars, for the rest of his life.

Sebastian tried to shrug in answer to a question he no longer remembered, but every part of his body told him that was a bad idea. 

An abrupt cessation of movement and a sound like the death of a small animal told him it was over. Jim pulled out slowly: Sebastian groped his way around his consciousness and was about to remove his hand from its current unhygienic home when a sweaty, unsteady hand grabbed him by the scars and shoved his finger deeper.

"We're not done," Jim said, out of breath and manic.

Sebastian was of the opinion that he was both done and _done for_ , but he only nodded weakly and nearly had a heart attack as Jim's lips touched the part of him he'd taken to calling his dick as an alternative to trying to remove it with a razor.

And then his tongue.

While the red-hot beacon of pain in his leg flashed through his consciousness at regular intervals, Sebastian's mind filled slowly with static as his body filled with what felt like electricity. He stopped thinking in straight lines, or in the sudden bursts of agony: somewhere, somewhere in the disconnected world of his body Jim was shoving his own hand deeper inside him. Somewhere in the blood-stained mess of a cheap hotel bed he was being fucked, gloriously and without cease, while he possibly bled out. But his mind had taken leave and was flying, somewhere far above the commuter town and the shit hotel and the terrifying sex and the past and the future—

Just as Sebastian came, Jim slapped him on the thigh.

Sebastian made an effort to crawl out of his own skin, and succeeded only in not-quite-hitting Jim in the mouth.

"Nice," said Jim, sitting back. He wiped his face on the back of his hand. 

"Fucking _hell_." Sebastian curled into a foetal ball on the revolting bedsheets and tried to reacquaint himself with gravity and a sense of self.

"If you say so," said Jim, and got off the bed.

Sebastian heard the door open and close. He lay stiff on the stiffening sheets and worked at his brain like a man whittling at soapstone. He _probably_ wasn't IED roadside carnage. He wasn't roadkill rabbit. He wasn't a blood-saturated steak tenderised for the pot. Sebastian hauled himself towards his identity like a wounded soldier kitten-crawling to salvation, and wondered vaguely if Jim was going to come back or if he was just going to be found dead here by the police.

The light faded further, until he was lying in a diffuse greyness striped with shadows from the alternating thickness of the curtains.

The door opened just as the streetlight outside finally pinged on, leaving him under orange grimness and the shadows of raindrops on the window pane. Sebastian didn't so much as lift his head.

"I got you a _present_ ," said Jim. The door slowly closed.

"Huh," said Sebastian, frozen in place like a crescent of pain, ebbing and flowing under foul light.

Something hard struck him lightly in the back, thrown from the doorway. Followed by something soft. Sebastian rolled over at last, groping for the offending item, and dragged his eyes back into focus.

One travel-sized bottle of TCP. Two rolls of bandages.

"I had to walk a mile to find these, you moody fucker," said Jim, with the elation of a man who was clearly immensely proud of his sacrifice. "Say thank you."

"You could have taken the van," Sebastian muttered, sitting up. He examined his leg, and almost blanched at the sight.

"I can't drive," Jim said, with a dangerous smile. "And I don't intend to learn."

"This needs stitches," said Sebastian, staring at the gaping mouth in his leg.

"I can do _that_ ," Jim said, still hanging around the doorway with his hands in his pockets. "But you're going to have to get used to this."

Sebastian looked up sharply. "I have a doctor."

Jim shook his head. "No. He's for the other shit." He gestured with his hairline toward the mess between Sebastian's fingers. "That's _mine_."

* * *

Their working life diverged quickly. Sebastian was, he understood, a commodity like all the others in Jim's portfolio. Sometimes he stood behind Jim and waited for the opportunity to stick a knife in someone, but mostly he shot people; it was what he was good at.

He shot people for money, and he was very good at it.

Jim put him in contact with several people who cast their own shells, and a gun-runner who came in from the Khyber once every six months. Jim put him in contact with people who wanted swift, untraceable executions from a distance. Jim put him in contact with people who were willing to pay, directly, sums of money that could each have individually purchased a house anywhere in the country that wasn't London. 

Putting them in contact was usually all that he did.

"I take a commission," Jim explained to someone, over the phone. "Just a small one. The knowledge of a job well done is most important to me." He gently stressed 'knowledge'; Sebastian was sure they already knew. Jim was a human library of blackmail material. 

Jim Moriarty helped people to meet people. A dating service for the underworld. A fattening effect on Colonel Sebastian Moran's bank account. Sebastian did not see him much for work purposes.

There was very little change, and he didn't stop reaching frantically for the Beretta that now lived on the floor beside his bed, whenever he woke like a diver from the depths to find Jim talking in his ear. He'd long stopped trying to change the locks.

Sometimes he didn't wake at all, drugged to sleep with the usual execrable cocktail of Carrington's prescriptions, and woke to find Jim in his flat eating toast or soya beans or MacDonald's with the bovine smirk of someone who has done something terrible, and only then he would think to check if there were semen stains on his back. Jim was not, after all, a stalwart fan of informed consent.

One drunken lonely evening Sebastian staggered across the TV edit of _Fight Club_ somewhere in the terrestrial slots of the EPG, and after more very expensive whisky than was good for anyone he made the mistake of sending Jim a text:

 _I've decided you're a figment of my imagination_.

No reply. A few weeks later Jim was in his flat again, changing clothes and making himself coffee – something frothy and repulsive, an order that never settled: Jim revelled in existing without defining characteristics in his everyday life, being impossible to pin down – and Carrington, unannounced, arrived with the intention of a purchase.

"James!" Carrington exclaimed with mildly discomforted enthusiasm. "Good grief! I don't think I've seen you since that conference in Dublin. How the devil are you?"

Sebastian, naked to the waist and bearing a fearsome bruise across his clavicle, watched the conversation with dull interest. Carrington wouldn't buy with a professional acquaintance in the flat, and would make some excuse about a check-up. Jim would enjoy making him uncomfortable. It was all very predictable.

"I didn't know you knew Colonel Moran," Carrington's voice drifted up out of the pleasantries. 

"Oh, he does some work for me now and then," said Jim, carelessly, letting his eyes rove over Sebastian's body with a frankness of desire which Sebastian was certain was put on for the benefit for Carrington. 

Carrington looked baffled. "I had no idea he had that level of diplomacy."

"He's quite specialised," said Jim, with a deep, vicious smirk. Carrington, none the wiser, made his excuses about not wanting to interfere with a social visit and bullied Sebastian gently into the promise of a future check-up. 

When he had left, Jim's smile faded like a winter evening's light and naked black disapproval skulked into its place. He shook his head with a vinegarish expression, and came to poke Sebastian in the sternum.

"Don't try to _manipulate_ me," he said, with clear disgust. "You're pathetic. Absolutely fucking pathetic."

"You invited him," said Sebastian, not fool enough to brush the finger away. 

"Did I," said Jim, regarding him evenly with pitch-black eyes. 

"Well I bloody didn't," said Sebastian, leaning back. "And I don't believe in coincidences."

"Pathetic," Jim repeated, laying his hand flat on Sebastian's sternum. "Utterly fucking pathetic." He brought his face to within a hair's breadth of Sebastian's, and murmured, "I know what you want."

"I don't," said Sebastian with a sad anger and more honesty than he'd intended. 

"Yes you fucking do," said Jim, closing his hand around Sebastian's throat and pushing him backward, toward the kitchen wall. "And you're not getting it until I say so."

He fucked him bloody on the kitchen floor, and spat on him when he was done. In the half an hour it took Sebastian to recover from his own orgasm, Jim aimlessly hoovered the bedroom and shouted predictions at the stock index on TV. When Sebastian got up, he left.

* * *

"You're looking well," Carrington said, bundling his opium into his pocket. "Something agrees with you."

"You're just saying that because my wrist isn't actually _broken_ ," Sebastian muttered. 

"Well, you're pink-cheeked and rosy-lipped and you didn't look like you wanted to set fire to anything when I mentioned old whatshisface who did for your hand," Carrington observed with a smile, "which I think bodes well, considering he lives in London now. Or so I've heard, I don't really keep up with army medics myself but this one does have rather an important connection to one of my patients…"

Sebastian shook his head. 

"He was in papers recently, you see," said Carrington.

In retrospect Sebastian should have noticed the feeling that someone was walking over his grave, but at the time he'd just wanted Carrington out of his fucking flat with his drugs so that he could eat dinner.

* * *

"Sometimes things get better before they get worse, too," said Williams, whose most recent bout of grafts had rejected. 

Sebastian was acutely aware that what he was doing constituted moping. It made him angry, but since he couldn't admit to mooning about the place in foul spirits over the non-appearance of an aggressively sociopathic rapist in his flat, he could hardly admit to being angry with himself for caring. He was strongly tempted to take it out on Williams, but Williams had functions above and beyond punching-bag and he'd had half of one of the man's Xanax.

"You're a ray of fucking sunshine," Sebastian noted.

"I just want my face back," said Williams, with a naked honesty that made Sebastian's insides shrivel up. He spread out the newspaper across his knees and announced, "Sherlock Holmes."

Sebastian grunted and looked at his feet. 

"Weird name," said Williams, reading on. "He seems to be embarrassing the police a lot, though, look, doing most of their work for them."

Sebastian stared at his knees and grunted again.

"Must be nice to be able to contribute to society like that and still pick and choose your own hours," said Williams. "Oh, he has a flatmate. Probably – a doctor, well, that explains it. I mean, I know better than everyone they're not exactly on millions but this one looks – I wonder if they're gay, they do look a bit like a couple –" Williams prattled on. "John Watson."

Sebastian, who had been chasing the tail of the thought _why is everyone so fucking obsessed with Sherlock fucking Holmes_ with worse grace than usual, sat up. "Who?"

"John Watson. Dr John Watson, retired army doctor, flatmate and 'assistant' to the private detective –" Williams said, delighted that Sebastian was taking an interest and clearly ready for a conversation. "I mean, that does sound like they're a couple."

"John Watson," said Sebastian, staring at his left hand. "Thanks a fucking lot."

* * *

Karen Willoughby had been in Sebastian’s form at school. He hadn’t liked her very much but he hadn’t disliked her very much either. She’d made no indelible impression and wasn’t quite totally forgettable. 

She called up on a Thursday afternoon and asked if he wanted to come for dinner, and old habits died hard; he forgot that he had the means to buy himself an entire restaurant at this point, sitting in various numbered accounts in various tax havens. He forgot that he might be called upon at any minute to push a pin through her eye. He only saw ‘free dinner’ and went after it with the dogged determination of the mercenary he was almost comfortable thinking of himself as.

“It’s been ages,” she said. “Last time was that reunion thing, wasn’t it?”

“I wasn’t there,” said Sebastian, who had been in Iraq and preferred it that way.

“God,” Karen muttered, “I must be losing it. It’s this bloody book.”

She went on for about half an hour about a book she was supposed to be handling, while Sebastian chewed his way slowly through a starter and several questions that had nothing to do with Karen or the restaurant or anything that could be answered here and now. Sunlight filtered through the blinds of the restaurant and strafed the table cloth in stripes. The sight of it made him feel abruptly sick.

“Anyway,” Karen concluded, “they’ve built up the idea that she’s going to get rich off the back of it, so of course I have to be the bad guy and recalibrate her expectations because her bloody agent won’t do it – they go in with all this enthusiasm and get them fired up about six-figure advances and then it’s up to _me_ to let them know that they’re getting a four-figure advance at most and not to go trying to buy a bigger house just yet.” She finally took a mouthful of her starter, and grimaced. Then, as if this hadn’t been the purpose of the meal, she added, “I’ve started divorce proceedings from David.”

They got drunk. 

“Are you seeing anyone?” Karen asked, half-way through ordering more wine.

Sebastian considered the bruise on his hip, the bite deep enough to draw blood from his clavicle, the ruined clothes. He considered the depths of Jim’s vicious black eyes. He considered the way he said, ‘he’s interesting’. 

“No,” he said.

“I’m surprised,” said Karen. “You always seemed to be at school.”

“The real world’s less forgiving,” said Sebastian. 

Karen toasted this. They got more drunk.

Her hotel room was in Earls Court: “Shitty, but the house are paying for it so I can’t expect Claridges.” At least, Karen pointed out, they were obliged to pay her drinks tab as well, and what with the stress of dealing with a pernickety agent with ideas above her already elevated station, and the divorce, she was buggered if she was going to let that slip through her hands.

“I’ve always been curious,” Karen admitted, undoing Sebastian’s shirt. 

_Fuck you_ , thought Sebastian. He thought it out of the window, down the street. There wasn’t a fuck you to be spared for Karen. She was struggling for shore and he didn’t care enough to save her or drown her; the fuck you was for more celebrated company.

It was a miserable penance on them both. Karen was too drunk, ended up crying. Sebastian left while she was still sobbing to herself about having gone to seed so much that the best she could manage was a circus freak, and he had no interest in hanging around to be the stick she beat herself with.

He took a taxi home, crawled up the stairs on his hands and knees. 

His flat was dark and empty as a fresh-dug grave, and the thought just made him want to drink more. He crawled to the lavatory and hung his head into the bowl for the vomit that never came. Awoke like it the next morning to the sound of disco emanating from his phone in the other room.

When he got to it there was a missed call and a text. 

_Pathetic_ , said the text. _I told you not to try this_.

* * *

Airport security might have been an issue were it not for the leg. Sebastian arrived at the metal detectors at Heathrow almost sweating his intestines out, nearly suffered heart failure at the predictable beep of the archway and the predictable beep of the wand.

“What have you got there?” asked the security staff, with a certain grimness.

“False leg,” said Sebastian, rolling up his trouser leg to show them the ankle. “I lost it in Afghanistan.”

“Oh right, mate,” said the security officer, straightening up hastily. “Sorry to bother you, we just have to check. If you tell the cabin crew they’ll make sure you’re in a good spot.”

Quite what spot they thought would help Sebastian couldn’t work out. He just walked onto the plane with a bowie knife strapped to his thigh, and dozed off on a two-hour flight with the certainty that the world continued to work in very stupid ways.

He identified his target just as they came in to land. It was drizzling in Copenhagen: hot wet summer, grey as a used dishcloth, sticking to everything and everyone, especially the windowpanes.

He followed Rafe McGill into the men’s lavatories and slit his throat before he was through passport control. Changed his shirt, acquired a cane from one of the airport shops, and stumped away onto a train before a single word had been said. 

Three changes of train later it was dark and he was in Brussels, looking for the hotel room that held a promised L181A. The rain here was more buckets than mist, and he was drenched by the time he reached the sanctuary of clean sheets and indifferent staff. He got himself good and drunk, and passed out in the shower.

This target went down like a cardboard stand-up at a practice range. He left the rifle, and caught at train to Paris. In theory he should have just got straight on the Eurostar at Brussels; in practice, Sebastian found the idea of returning to London made his bowels clench and his chest hurt.

He remained in Paris.

Drunk somewhere between the Sorbonne and the Notre Dame, bearing down on the latter from the former, he presented an inviting target to muggers and an alarming one to tourists. Eventually he stumbled into a restaurant that overlooked the cathedral, and let the man who’d been pursuing him catch him up.

He was addressed in fluent but evidently English-originated French. The man wanted a cigarette. He wanted money for a drink. He wanted to know if he’d served in the same regiment as Sebastian. He was sure he recognised him.

Sebastian looked past the wig and the accent and into the blue eyes and the bizarre cheekbones and said yes, he was sure he recognised this old soldier too. “You’re asking the wrong man,” he said. 

He melted away into the night. Sebastian ordered dinner and sat in a fug of other people’s cigarette smoke in a foul temper. ‘Brilliant’, was he? ‘Interesting’? With a disguise a drunk could see through and the inability to find his own fucking target? This was worth risking everything for, was it?

Sebastian contemplated going after the fake soldier and putting him out of everyone’s misery, but he knew the chance had passed. He knew the retribution would have been too great to face. He knew – pissing furiously in the restaurant lavatory – he would never have done it without Jim’s say-so, and the knowledge made him want to punch something.

He pre-empted Jim’s summons. Was already outside Ashtead at a quarter to midnight when the text demanding to know why he wasn’t back yet arrived. There was no satisfaction in replying: _I’m on my way_. 

Where else did he have to go?

* * *

“I’m going to play a game,” Jim announced.

Sebastian, who had banked on being able to spend Monday alone with his raging hangover and self-pity on his sofa, nodded weakly and considered throwing something at the TV. He felt he could _either_ handle the continual blare of rolling news with its occasional local feature on Sherlock fucking Holmes – whose name provoked more response from Jim than anything else Sebastian had seen – or he could handle Jim’s bloody plan, but he wasn’t sure he could deal with both. The combined sources of noise trampled over an imprudent amount of twelve-hours-ago scotch and made him nauseous. Shrank his skin.

“And you’re going to need this,” Jim added, throwing something at Sebastian. It hit him in the chest, knocked the wind out of him, made him feel as if someone was attempting to knock out something he’d swallowed.

Sebastian picked it up. It was a laser sight attachment. 

“I don’t need one of these,” Sebastian said, scornfully. “No one needs one of these. They’re useless.”

Jim merely looked at him as if he were very, very stupid, and said, “They have an effect.”

“On moron civilians,” sighed Sebastian. It meant he wasn’t about to be called upon to remove the thorn from Jim’s side.

Jim shrugged. “On the police.”

Sebastian examined the laser sight through narrowed eyes, but didn’t raise his head from the sofa arm. “This is nonsense.”

“You’re not shooting him,” said Jim, wandering away to lounge in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his pockets. “He’s too interesting. Do you know how rarely I get to find someone to play with who isn’t a complete disappointment?”

Sebastian took the barb and stored it next to all the others. He laid the laser sight on the floor beside the sofa and glanced sideways at the TV: it could be said, he thought, that there was such a thing as being too cruel. Then again, it wasn’t as if Jim was banking on his unswerving loyalty so much as his inability to go anywhere else. He sighed, and didn’t voice the thought: _he’s going to disappoint you as well_.

He wasn’t quite sure what expectations Jim had, but he was almost certain they were too high.

Jim elucidated the part Sebastian was to play in his game. Only the bare bones, only Sebastian’s role; the Way of Jim was to keep as many people as possible in the dark at all times, and you either got used to it or you got killed.

Sebastian lay on the sofa and nodded. It seemed straightforward enough.

“And other than that,” Jim concluded, “you stay out of the fucking way.”

“Got it,” said Sebastian, with a tired salute. 

“It’ll be fun,” said Jim.

 _No it won’t,_ thought Sebastian, turning onto his face as the TV, once again, brought up the hated name with a chuckle.

* * *

The Game, as it unfolded, struck Sebastian as increasingly more pathetic and irritating. The Golem – a waste of a perfectly good assassin, albeit an even more freakishly signature-bearing one than him. A forged painting that could have been forged better. Poisoned TV poofs. At least he got to shoot an OAP, but that had next to no joy in it.

“Kill her,” Jim muttered, over the radio.

And Sebastian, on the rooftop, tossed away the stupid laser sight and shot the stupid bitch and set off the explosion. Messy, stupid, pointless: it wasn’t even kind. No one cared about an old lady. She was poorly-chosen. Anyone would think Jim _wanted_ to be caught.

And then: the swimming pool.

“You’re not to shoot him unless I say so,” Jim reminded him, throwing a bucket of toy laser pointers and a child’s mobile into the seats. “Right. Everything ready. Except that. You can handle that. Oh, this is _exciting_.”

 _Fuck is it,_ thought Sebastian, as Jim half-danced away to wake up his black-bagged prize. 

“No shooting him unless I say sooo,” Jim added, darting out through one of the doors. “This is more important than your hand.”

Sebastian looked down at the two remaining fingers on his left hand and thought about how inevitable it was that Jim knew and found this particular coincidence hilarious. Maybe he’d set the whole thing up. Maybe he’d introduced that fucking shambles of a doctor to his Great Nemesis to give him something to take away. Maybe it was just blackmail for Sebastian. Maybe. Maybe.

He got comfortable among the seats. Maybe there was a possibility he’d actually be allowed to shoot one, or both of them after all.

His phone vibrated. 

“If you’re going to tell me not to shoot him _again_ ,” muttered Sebastian, through gritted teeth. 

_SH on his way. Exploding vest is opportunity 1. Don’t say I don’t keep my promises._

A tranquil calm slipped over Sebastian in that moment. There would be, he accepted, a certain poetry in this. If that arsehole Watson wanted to have his breakdown all over Sebastian’s fucking hand, if Sherlock bloody Holmes and his weird face and his hideous bourgeois obsession with crime wanted to hack all the fun out of Sebastian’s life like this then at least they could all go together in one rosy orange explosion and spare themselves from this tangled web.

For a brief moment he didn’t want to kill them at all. He wasn’t quite sure they’d suffered anything like enough.

Sherlock bloody Holmes arrived at the swimming pool.

Sherlock bloody Holmes and his bloody bloody neurotic doctor friend proceeded to foul up their own deaths. 

Irene bloody Adler put her foot squarely in the way of decent retribution. 

And Sebastian dismantled his tripod and picked up his rifle and left a bucket of laser pointers floating in the swimming pool.

* * *

“Do I at least get to shoot that _bloody_ woman?” Sebastian asked, sitting in an unseasonably cold breeze on top of an unreasonably tall building. A few months since the swimming pool, since he didn't get to shoot John Watson, in which he got no peace from the omnipresence of Sherlock bloody Holmes, and in which he'd decided to blame Adler's inopportune phone call for the continuation of his displeasure. 

“No,” Jim said, down the phone. “Not yet. Give it a while. She’s still useful.”

“And I suppose,” said Sebastian, comfortable in his discomfort and the three-hundred-mile distance between him and his vindictive employer, “Sherlock Holmes is _still interesting_.”

“Stop bitching,” Jim said, with teeth in his voice. “Do your job. And turn on the TV around, oh, ten AM tomorrow.”

 _Great_ , thought Sebastian, screwing together his tripod bitterly. _More showmanship_.

* * *

Whatever plan it was of Jim’s that involved getting caught behaving like a five year old at the Tower of London, Sebastian wasn’t privy to it. He ironed his shirt, and watched CCTV footage relayed by the BBC, by Sky News, by ITN, by, eventually, Channel 5. He shook his head, and went on ironing.

His phone rang.

“Is that _James Moriarty_ on TV?” asked Carrington, incredulous.

“Probably not,” said Sebastian. “Which channel?”

“All of them,” said Carrington, nonplussed. “It certainly looks like him.”

“I’m sure he’s got more sense than to end up on the news for anything less than a Nobel prize,” said Sebastian, his jaw locking.

On the screen, footage of Jim in a crown looped over and over, and the black depths of his eyes were flat and terrible, and Sebastian sighed at his iron and wondered what the fuck was going to happen now.

* * *

The newspapers next attempted to convince him that there was no such person as Jim Moriarty.

“If it’s a trick, it’s a bloody long-running one,” said Carrington, writing out Sebastian’s prescription for more testosterone, more codeine, more zopiclone, more unused and unwanted diazepam. “I met him in, good lord, ninety nine, it must have been? In Dublin. The first time, I mean. He was presenting a paper on exo-planets. Very interesting stuff – not my field, but fascinating business – most of which seems to have been confirmed by observation now. The second time he was presenting one on … horticulture, was it? I’m afraid I wasn’t, ahha, wasn’t my best self at that particular conference.”

He left, opium in hand, with a cheery wave. 

“Richard Brooks persecuted by famous detective,” explained one headline, and, “TOP DICK SCREWS RICK,” yelped another, in huge black letters, revelling in its base-level wordplay. 

“Actor Richard Brooks,” Sebastian snorted, lobbing dirty clothes towards a laundry basket. There seemed to be an empty bottle of Laphroaig under them, one he neither remembered buying nor drinking. He pushed it with his left, rubber foot towards the bin, but didn’t trouble to pick it up.

Maybe there was no Jim Moriarty and maybe there was only a very in-character role. If that was the case – which Sebastian severely doubted – Richard Brooks deserved every Oscar going for years. He was more method than Daniel Day Lewis. More committed than Dustin Hoffman’s self-torturing days on end awake. 

He ignored his phone ringing. Oh yes. Richard Brooks was clearly quite fucked up.

Sebastian touched the scar on his thigh meditatively. There were others, now, but none so deep or so broad. None so dark. It had yet to fade: like a bright birth mark raised above the level of the skin. What an incredible _act_.

The door burst open.

“Answer your _fucking phone_ ,” Jim said, breathless and giddy. “I’ve got work for you.”

“Have you,” said Sebastian, finally stooping to pick up the empty scotch bottle. “What does _the actor Richard Brooks_ want from me?”

Jim rolled his eyes. “Shut up,” he said, rampaging through to the kitchen without a pause. “You’re going to like this.”

“Am I.”

Jim pulled out a packet of ham from the fridge, looked at the sell-by date, frowned, and threw it at the bin. “You’re going to _love_ this,” he corrected, taking a lump of stilton and biting into it like an apple. “This is going to be your _moment_.”

Sebastian doubted this, on account of every moment being Jim’s moment, and Jim being very particular about that fact. He said nothing, and let the scotch bottle dangle as empty as a junkie’s mind from his right hand. “Enlighten me.”

“Today’s the day,” said Jim, vibrating with excitement. “Today is the day when everything becomes wonderful.”

“Are you on something?”

“You’re going to like this,” Jim said, with a sharkish smile. He pointed Sebastian’s stilton at him. “Either you get to shoot John Watson,” his grin widened until it nearly touched the sides of his ears, ghoulish and self-satisfied in the afternoon light, “or Sherlock Holmes _kills himself_.”

* * *

Sebastian watched through binoculars as he neither got to shoot John Watson nor see Sherlock Holmes kill himself.

He packed away his gun and, after some deliberation, threw it in a skip.

By the time he made it down the stairs Sherlock Holmes was lying on the pavement, surrounded by his own blood. All he could think to think about it was _well if John Watson is there to help him he's definitely dead_ , and he stepped into the nearest taxi.

He wasn't entirely surprised to see Joey behind the wheel.  
"What now?" he asked, as Joey pulled away at a speed that should have broken them out of the earth's gravitational field.

"He's dead then?" Joey said, doing a handbrake turn and throwing Sebastian against the wall of the taxi. 

Sebastian nodded. 

"Der boss, I mean," Joey insisted, his accent scrambling into something that sounded generically dubious without any other qualifiers. 

Sebastian nodded.

"I'd get the fuck out mate," Joey suggested, looking nervously up and down the streets. "Dunno bout you but I got a _lot_ of geezers don't want me breathing and got no reason to hold back any more."

It was after all the kind of business in which one made enemies.

"See you," said Sebastian, when Joey deposited him outside his flat with a swift salute that had finality stamped all over it. Rats flee the sinking ship: the Colonel knew he was sunk. There was no fleeing.

* * *

TV news became unbearable. A dead body found on the roof of Barts: suicide by handgun. A dead body found on the pavement below Barts: suicide by leaping off the side of a bloody big building. "A tangled web of intrigue", a "complex mystery ending in two deaths", a fucking nail for the Colonel's coffin with every repetition.

He went to his club.

"There's this guy in Macedonia," said Williams, and for a moment the Colonel examined his sentence for clues, until he realised he hadn't been listening to a hopeless tirade about poverty and skin grafts and surgeons.

"How much," he said, wearily, hearing the sound of cash registers in his mind.

"What?"

"How much money do I have to give you to go away and get your face nailed back on and leave me alone?"

The Colonel found a game in progress in Ashbrooke's room. There weren't supposed to be visitors to a man's room at the club and there definitely wasn't supposed to be gambling, but 'supposed' would have kept him out of the bloody Club altogether and wasn't so stringently observed here.

He sat in the white-walled room with its eighth-hand Constable prints and lost two hundred grand over the course of six hours.

He went home.

* * *

"I'm really sorry," Karen Willoughby's voice said, in his voicemail messages. "I was so drunk. I just. Bits of it keep coming back to me and I feel like such an arse, I can't believe I said those things. It was completely, completely unforgivable."

She exhaled slowly, heavily. The Colonel, lying eight feet away from his phone, snarled and threw a cushion at it. The cushion fell short: the stripes of light cast by imperfect blinds fell across the walls with the finality of prison bars, but the police refused to find him, and so did the fucking Russians.

"I'm just going through some stuff," said Karen. "I've got all these stupid issues thanks to David. And it was just wrong to let that get on top of me. Listen, we should catch up sometime when we're both sober. I'd like to, well, talk about what _you're_ doing. Not about my stupid problems."

The Colonel said an extremely rude word to the floor by his face. Outside in the street someone expressed similar sentiments through the medium of car horn and brake pad.

* * *

After three months of the police not breaking his door down the Colonel accepted that they had better things to do than arrest a hired killer who hadn't even racked up as many confirmed kills as Harold bloody Shipman. The Russians were another matter; Joey had sensibly disappeared, but he himself seemed to be invisible, or irrelevant, or …

The Colonel bought a bottle of scotch that cost more than a second-hand car and drank it.

* * *

John Watson bought shoes and socks. John Watson saw patients at a clinic. John Watson ate food, alone, in cafes and restaurants, because he seemed about as set on the domestic arts as the Colonel himself.

He went to a military-appointed therapist.

The Colonel resumed his visits with the same military-appointed therapist.

John Watson, haggard and hollowed-out, crossed his path in the waiting room. He had the thousand-yard-stare. He had the steady hands. He had the hunched shoulders and miserable precision. Had he not been the architect of the removal of pieces of the Colonel's life until there was nothing left but the fragments of a walking skeleton, had the Colonel been given to sentiment or sympathy, he might even have felt sorry for him.

None of these provisos being in place, the Colonel boiled with a cold hatred until John Watson stood up for his appointment. 

When he returned, he registered the Colonel's presence with a faint frown.

"Do I know you from somewhere?" he asked, his head drifting to one side. "I'm sorry, my memory's … not brilliant at the moment."

The Colonel choked down bile and said, softly, "I don't think so."

"You look very familiar," said John Watson, shaking his head. "I'm … sure …"

"Colonel Moran," said the therapist, from the doorway, "I'm ready for you now."

"Moran," said John Watson, behind the Colonel, as he turned to attend his appointment. "Moran."

The Colonel spent his fifty-minute appointment glaring through the top of the therapist's head and thinking up every single misogynist and racist thing he _could_ have said to her. The suspension of cruelty above her head without her knowledge felt comfortable, a weak clawing-back of power, right until she looked him in the eye and asked what he was thinking about, and he realised that every poisonous word would be merely tolerated and treated with the sad exasperation of a primary school teacher.

The vicious flailings of a child's tantrum. _It might hurt, but you can't really hold it against them, they barely know what they're doing._

He bit the inside of his cheek and thought about the sweating, sad face of John Watson and his own delirium and the truncated spars of bone and the order that hadn't come and the bullet that hadn't ripped through his face and the shape he hadn't made on the pavement next to his precious stupid fucking Sherlock bloody Holmes, and the grey inevitability of every single moment that preceded from that, and the dull aching certainty that he would never, ever see in colour again.

* * *

"You seem off-colour," Carrington said, somewhat dryly, as the Colonel presented an arm, and the good doctor slid on an elasticated tourniquet.

"I'm _spiffing_ ," the Colonel muttered, even more dryly. Carrington slipped the latch along the elastic, and both men waited for a moment. "I don't see why you need to do this."

"Technically," said Carrington, "it's a good idea to monitor the levels in your blood to make sure you're not over-injecting."

"I'm not going bald."

"No, but your blood pressure has gone through the roof." Carrington paused, and reached for an alcohol swap. "Also, if I can speak frankly, your flat is a pit."

The Colonel shrugged. "It's hard to clean."

"Get a cleaner."

"I happen," said the Colonel, "to be out of a job."

Carrington swiped the inside of the Colonel's elbow and felt around, gloved and cautious, for a vein. "That's not a permanent state."

"I'm afraid my leadership skills don't translate very well to the civilian marketplace," said the Colonel, looking at the ceiling as the doctor pricked him with the cannula. There was a brief, sharp sensation, and the unmistakable weirdness of metal under skin.

"Sapphy said you ran into John Watson at the clinic," said Carrington.

The Colonel shot him a dirty look, and diverted his gaze again as he caught an eyeful of his own dark blood traversing a narrow tube. "I didn't run into him, I was in the same room as him."

"And magnificently failed to punch him in the face," Carrington observed, disconnecting the phial. He produced another. "She was quite surprised."

"Is she supposed to be discussing patients with you?"

"Your care is both of our concerns, so, yes." Carrington fixed the second phial in place, and it began immediately to fill. The Colonel looked away again, faintly nauseated. "It's not as if I was chatting to her about it over cocktails at Dabbous." 

Carrington removed the second phial, and the tubing. The Colonel pinched the palm of his own right hand and felt the sides of his tooth with his tongue.

"Punching him doesn't bring back my hand," said the Colonel, when Carrington had taken the cannula and pressed a cotton ball in its place. _Or anything else_.

"The man you were when you got wind of what happened wouldn't have made that distinction," Carrington pointed out, tossing the cannula into the kitchen bin with a casualness that belied the possibility of its sticking him. "You were, I am informed, hell and fire convinced you were going to 'break his fucking hand for him and see how he liked being deprived of his digits for no good fucking reason'."

The Colonel shrugged. "Watch it, or I'll revise my position."

"You want to know what I think your problem is?" Carrington added, packing away the remainder of his equipment – primarily into the bin, the tourniquet slipping back into a satchel which cruelly refused to conform to the classic image of the Gladstone bag. 

The Colonel shrugged again. Phrases like _do I want to know anything about what you think_ drifted through his mind, but he only sat pressing cotton to the interior of his arm with a plain blue sticking plaster sitting on the table in front of him, waiting for the opportune moment. Nausea rose and fell.

"I think you're depressed again."

"Very funny," said the Colonel. "I've never _been_ depressed."

"Bullshit," said Carrington, with one of his more charming smiles. "Just because you chuck therapy and refuse to take what you're prescribed doesn't make you not ill, any more than not blowing your nose means it isn't running or not using a condom means you don't have the clap."

The Colonel regarded him coldly. "Is that your _professional_ opinion?"

"It's either that or heartbreak," said Carrington simply, standing up. 

"Please don't hesitate to go." The Colonel released the cotton and slapped on the plaster. He flexed his arm, and glanced up at the doctor, who still hadn't budged. "Don't think I have the slightest time for your sentimental drivel about feelings and heartbreak. You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about."

"To be quite honest," said Carrington, who mendaciously plopped himself on the sofa instead, "I was planning on giving you a talk about alternatives to suicide, you look so bleak."

"I'm not doing that."

"You sound like you've given it some thought, though."

"I'm owed something," said the Colonel, stubbornly. He got up, and limped across to the sofa. He'd lost enough weight now that the fit of his leg wasn't as snug as before, and keeping his balance on it became the act of a shuffling wreck, instead of an almost-invisible stride. "I was promised something and I'm not going until I get it."

"Well, I said I was _planning_ to," said Carrington, amiably. "I thought it seemed a bit heavy-handed, so I'm plumping for solution two."

"Which is?"

Carrington retrieved one of the muslin bags that the Colonel had furnished him with. "I was going to offer to share my stash."

"I'm not doing that, either," said the Colonel, setting his jaw. "I don’t have time for that stuff."

"It'll take the edge off."

"I don't want the edge taken off."

* * *

"You've been conspicuous in your absence," said General Matthew Arbuthnot, greeting the Colonel at a sunny lunch table overlooking the Thames. He looked uncomfortable, and about two stone fatter than he had when he'd stood, quivering and white-lipped, and denounced the Colonel on his doorstep as a number of things not really fit for print and none especially inaccurate.

"I was under the impression I was a persona non grata," said the Colonel, struggling down into his seat. Arbuthnot regarded him dispassionately, but the Colonel made such a meal of the process that he was obliged to summon a waiter over to assist him. 

"You are," Arbuthnot said, when the waiter had cleared out, laying two leather-backed menus surreptitiously between them on the primrose table-linen. "Don't think you're forgiven. What you did went beyond unforgivable. I am merely making sure you're still amongst the living."

"Why wouldn't I be?" The Colonel balanced his fingers on the menu and leaned forward to give Arbuthnot his most reptilian stare. 

Arbuthnot muttered something and looked out over the river. "I don't see why you should be granted the freedom of a peaceful death."

"Charitable," said the Colonel, with a smirk. "I thought you were a Christian. Surely you'd be delighted for me to die. Don't I have an eternity of suffering ahead of me?"

Arbuthnot sighed. "If I thought for a second you felt the slightest bit of remorse –"

"Our long and fruitless friendship," said the Colonel, opening the menu. "Has not exactly been characterised by remorse. How's Claire?"

"Don't talk about her, please." 

The Colonel shrugged, and peered into the depths of the menu. "There's no need to be touchy about _that_."

"I had no intention of—" Arbuthnot looked around, and lowered his voice substantially, "—of _marrying_ you. You can't, Caroline—you can't make it about that."

The Colonel gave him another basilisk stare. "Could you perhaps return to shouting at me that I'm a traitor and a disgrace to my country and an abominable human being, accept that I wanted the money, and that your _dick_ had nothing to do with it?"

"Then don't bring up Claire."

"I was making conversation," said the Colonel, with an icy smile. "For example, oh, I see you have endowed a specialist ward at Great Ormond Street, that is very kind of you. The children must all be very grateful."

"Don't threaten them."

"You're reaching there, I feel," said the Colonel, closing the menu. Arbuthnot, stripped of any sense of his rank and power from where the Colonel sat – what did a General matter to a hit man, after all? – seemed flabby, porridgy and full of hot wind. It was the archetype of the General that Arbuthnot had been keen to puncture, making incisive decisions and excelling at tactical thinking both at Sandhurst and in the field, and now he'd gravitated towards bellicose balloon status just as his forebears had.

"What have you been up to?" Arbuthnot asked, with pointed politeness, as he opened his own menu.

The Colonel gazed out over the river, and thought about the stranglings, stabbings, the occasional explosions; about the parade of civilians shot that exceeded even his total in Iraq, where he'd made a hobby of doing it and blaming it on the men; about Joey, who was probably dead now, and Jim, who definitely was; about all the new mouths his skin had temporarily gained for the passage of Jim's cock; about the money that had come and gone again; about the status of being, briefly, Britain's most sought-after marksman: _Sebastian Moran can shoot a fly at thirty paces and he'd murder his own mother if you paid him enough: discreet, dedicated, brutal._

"Not a lot," said the Colonel, with a faint smile. "Trying and failing to get my life back together."

Arbuthnot seemed unable to let go, though. When the waiter had taken an order which the Colonel immediately forgot, he leaned forward over his place-setting again and said, "I can't help thinking this is somehow on me. But damnit, Caroline—"

"That is not my name."

"It's what I'm used to."

"It's not my name."

"-- _Moran_ \-- if you had only said that you had debts. If you had just given me some indication – your damnable bloody pride – what you did –" Arbuthnot sat back, a little sweaty about the face, and passed his hand over his eyes. "Good God. I promised myself I wasn't going to do this."

"My finances neither are nor were any of your business," said the Colonel, scratching the stumps of his two missing fingers. 

"They _became_ my business," said Arbuthnot, purpling magnificently, "when you _sold off_ fifty of my men – fifty of _your own bloody men_ \- to cover them. To be _murdered_. To be _tortured_. To be used as bargaining chips against us. No indication where they'd gone or what had happened. I could have written you the sodding cheque myself and you just threw their lives away – sold them out for a measly pissing thirty pieces of silver."

"It was considerably more than thirty pieces of silver," said the Colonel, who had himself thought that he'd set the price too low at the time. Considering what he knew now about the worth of human death, he could probably have held out for more, but they'd seemed to hold the upper hand at the time.

"You are a _despicable_ human being." 

"They went there to die," said the Colonel. "It really doesn't matter how."

"You vile, vile creature," Arbuthnot muttered, his mouth slightly ajar. "They went out there to serve their bloody country and they had the right to believe we were doing our best by them –"

"Erroneously," said the Colonel. "It's not as if you didn't plan for some wastage. I just made sure I got my money's worth."

"You're cold."

 _That was what you liked about me,_ thought the Colonel, placidly. A bottle of wine arrived. Arbuthnot tasted it, nodded a curt nod, and then refused to drink the glass poured for him. _That was what you enjoyed about me and what you never enjoyed about Claire, and that was why she was the person you went home to and I was the one you couldn't tear yourself away from._

It was a hollow reassurance. Matthew Arbuthnot's fascination was worth a lot less than fifty soldiers led into a cave to die.

"Cheer up," said the Colonel, with a facetious note in his voice. "Why not assume your divine retribution is coming for me in pieces?" He gestured to his finger stumps.

"You're not funny."

"Well, the leg certainly was," said the Colonel. It was the first time he'd allowed himself to think of it that way, and he found it didn't bother him at all. At the time he'd cursed fate and cursed what had been allowed to happen and Arbuthnot had visited him and sworn blind he would see to it that he got the best of everything and even, when they were alone, held his hand and muttered, _Caroline_ in an aghast tone that had told the Colonel everything he needed to know about where their idiotic affair was stopping. The missing leg was too much.

"I hardly think an _insect bite_ ," Arbuthnot growled. 

"The Lord works in mysterious ways," said the Colonel, with great sarcasm. "The flea, the cellulitis bacteria, God in motion. Of course, the lack of the right antibiotics was a little less of the Lord and a little more of poetic justice."

Arbuthnot frowned. "What are you talking about?"

The Colonel blinked, genuinely surprised. "I meant Weatherby and Ross at the infirmary had been black marketing the stuff to the towel-head civvies, did you really not know?"

"Weatherby and Ross." Arbuthnot looked profoundly uncomfortable. "As in the two men who—"

The Colonel smiled to himself. It had been by the way of a birthday present, a month early; Jim had said, _we need some mayhem in Wales. Who do you fancy for a gas explosion?_ and when the Colonel had named names Jim had laughed and said, _what a vindictive cunt you are, those men were the making of you_.

"I could have kept this leg," said the Colonel, slapping his own thigh. His fingers touched the edge of that first knife scar, the wound Jim had left him, like a puckered kissing mouth. "All it would have taken was the right antibiotics. No debts there, just the usual old-fashioned greed the lot of us dealt in while you were busy being bankrolled with Claire's business interests."

Arbuthnot scowled. "I will not take lectures in social responsibility and wealth from someone directly responsible for so many unavoidable deaths—"

"You're in the Army," said the Colonel. "I don’t think you have a choice in that."

"What is it you're trying to goad me into?" asked Arbuthnot, with a deep sigh. "Why are you _here_?"

"Lunch," said the Colonel. "In the grander scheme of things, I don't know." He watched a sudden reflection from a waiter's watch play a brief circle of light over Arbuthnot's face. "I'm owed something. I was promised something and I don't want to go until I've been given it."

Arbuthnot slowly changed colour again. "The only way you're getting more money out of _me_ is if it's to buy you a single fare to the Dignitas Clinic, you poisonous—"

"I wouldn't take it from you," said the Colonel, as Arbuthnot swallowed the rest of his invective in the presence of the waiter. A bowl of white soup, flecked with dark green, lay down in front of him with a soft click. There was the dance of condiments and questions: the waiter was sent away.

"What do you mean you _wouldn't take it from me_?" growled Arbuthnot, over-seasoning his lunch. "I distrust this. Every time you've evaded my money someone else has suffered for it. You may be the undeserved millstone around my neck but I am damned if I'm letting you drag anyone else down with you. If you really and truly are close enough to the end of your tether to, to, to take that way out, and you don't have the b—the stomach to do it yourself, and God knows it shouldn’t surprise me that you're a coward as well—then I will _quite willingly_ take the hit for the cost of your lethal bloody injection. There will be rejoicing in the barracks, let me tell you."

"I _meant_ ," said the Colonel simply, his cold grey eyes crawling over Arbuthnot's face like sand flies over a hot beach, "my death doesn't belong to you, Matthew. It doesn't belong to me either."

He tried some of the soup.

It was entirely perfect.

* * *

His birthday came and went. The Colonel barely noticed it. The summer wore on, hot and vile and oppressive, like a damp towel over his brain. Arbuthnot sent him a short note indicating that he was encouraging the police to reopen the investigation into the deaths of Weatherby and Ross, and suggesting that he 'do the decent thing'.

The Colonel went for a limp around Regents Park instead, and fed the ducks. They were not as vociferously enthusiastic in the summer as in the dead of winter, but they surrounded him with soft noise all the same, their comical orange feet slapping on the path.

It was an anniversary of sorts. What Jim had referred to once as the Enclosure Act: the last combination of elective surgeries had been past for multiple years now. A lengthy succession of -ectomies, culminating in the removal of a cervix, a uterus, some ovaries, and the stitching up of labia to leave a dark line running between the urethral opening and the anus. Dispassionate words for such a comfortable act.

When the Colonel finally worked out what day it was he toasted his own health in gin, the flat being out of scotch, and ignored a third phone call from a police inspector Jim had vaguely known, buzzing on his phone.

The doorbell rang.

The building owner had installed, at some cost, an intercom system. After some wrangling with the courier, repeated use of the words, "I am an amputee and I cannot come down to sign for it, you bloody well come _up_ so I can sign for it," he secured the acquisition of a box the size of a tea cup.

> VERY FRAGILE 

Said the tape. 

The Colonel signed for it. The courier, embarrassed to discover that he wasn't having his leg—sorry—pulled and that the recipient really was an amputee, took a while to clear out because he wouldn't stop apologising. At least he closed the door.

The handwriting was unfamiliar, but it was a familiar unfamiliarity – the alien script of someone who took pride in being impossible to pin down, in forming few habits, in throwing on and off identities more easily than most men changed their underwear. The Colonel felt his hands begin to shake as he unwrapped it.

"Happy Birthday," said the card, on Christmas wrapping paper. "I keep my promises."

The Colonel opened the box. He smiled at the mechanism. 

He mouthed, "Thank you," as the explosion took out his flat.

**Author's Note:**

> The apparently-necessary disclaimer: the views held by the protagonist and the views held by the author are not the same, we may both be trans men but that's basically the only thing we have in common.


End file.
